


About last night

by Mareshire



Category: Magic Kaito, 名探偵コナン | Detective Conan | Case Closed
Genre: Alcohol isn't good, But sure as hell will have a lot of words, Crushes, Eventual Romance, Eventual Smut, Friendzone, Hakuba appears a lot, Hangover, Hattori is there for the sake of the plot development, It's actually already an event, Kaito is a bi disaster, Kaito is still Kid, M/M, More characters to be added, One Night Stands, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Post-Conan Kudou Shinichi, Romantic Comedy, Shinichi is a piece of candy, Slow Burn, This may not have that many chapters, This will have a lot of chapters, aoran, shinkai, so many crushes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-12
Updated: 2018-10-09
Packaged: 2019-06-09 10:23:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 29,241
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15265437
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mareshire/pseuds/Mareshire
Summary: It may not have been 'love', but it was good enough for me to be unable to forget you.Inspired by Tea Namcha's "About last night".





	1. Of hangovers, moving pillows and unfortunate encounters

**Author's Note:**

> ###  **Welcome everybody to my first long fic!**
> 
> Damn, I can't believe I'm writing this. I mean, I'm pretty sure I don't have the knowledge to do this, but you know, I was listening to this song (like, lots of weeks ago. Seriously, _lots_ ) and watching the video and while a boy was undressing another boy I thought, "Hey, isn't this line perfect for a fic?" So, yeah, I'm pretty much doing this because I wanted to use that line.
> 
> I know I usually would be warning at this point and apologizing for having killed half the cast and mentally damaged the other half — but hey, this is comedy! I promise. This is comedy. Please, no disbelief. I promise this is fucking comedy. There's a voice mocking Kaito all the time and his life is just a fucking comedy and I promise no one will die. Aside from any generic DC corpse, that's it. But this is DC — it's impossible to write a long fic without killing someone and including Shinichi, because this is _Shinichi_ we're talking about.
> 
> Okay, now important stuff. Warnings. I don't really have any. I mean, the explicit rating is mostly for what's coming more than anything else. There's this small thing in this chapter, but nothing to actually being classified as explicit. So, you guy can all be safe for now. And enjoy Kaito's long suffer xd
> 
>  
> 
> **THIS IS IMPORTANT NOW!**
>
>> The last thing I have to say is this is ShinKai — Shinichi x Kaito — and I plan on keeping that. I'm trying to surpass myself as a writer, however, and might try to include KaiShin in later chapters. Please, notice this is just bedroom terminology and will not have any kind of influence in the characters' behavior. I will try to maintain them as IC as possible.
> 
> With nothing left to say,
> 
> ###  **Enjoy~!**

Waking up with a terrible headache, his mouth somewhere near desert-like dry and his leg over a pillow wasn't a big deal. He vaguely remembered going out the night before, and he may or may not have drunk half of the bar himself alone — not so great idea, by the way, as his head is giving its opinion — and he usually sleeps hugging a pillow, because that’s what happens when you’re single and lonely and your best friend, on whom you may or may not have had a crush for years, leaves you alone on your _birthday_ to spend the friday night with _her girlfriend_. But, okay, it was kind of normal. Nothing too bad. Until the pillow moved and passed an arm over his waist and huffed on his hair, and pillows doesn’t move or have arms or _damn breathe_. Pillows are supposed to be inanimate objects.

Pillows aren’t supposed to have legs to intertwine yours with or emit soft noises either.

Holding his breath, Kaito tries to withdraw from the embrace the pillow has him in and roll over, and mentally slaps himself because the pillow’s arms tighten around him and _of course they would, Kaito. People tend to tighten their grips when other people try to take their pillows away. You’re so not hugging a pillow, just admit it, you coward._

Ever so slowly, Kaito tries to crack one eye open — and immediately regrets it because, damn, who turned on the lights? It's way too early! He groans and tries again, feeling the weight of his eyelids as heavy as one of those damn tomato sauce pots covers (how can Ahoko open those things with just a wrist twist?!).

The first thing he sees, once he can focus his eyes enough to stop those annoying white spots from moving and take them away from his vision, is a blur of something dark brown that, as he nuzzles it, feels incredibly soft and warm. For a moment, Kaito allows himself to deeply breathe on it, bathing in some kind of strange mix of pine needles essence and fresh mint that surprisingly helps to clear his mind. Nevertheless, before his senses can completely drown in that comfy pool, his brain kind of clears enough to recapacite that the sheets feels suspiciously too directly with his skin and the leg between his is way too attached to his flesh and _damn it, Kaito, you’re naked. You’re naked as you were born, and the person with you is also naked, and I don’t really think two all-grown-up adults stripped to sleep together in the most innocent sense of the word. And — oh my God. People still don’t have three legs, have they?_

The realization slaps Kaito hard enough to make him come back to his senses and sit up straight in the matter of seconds — and okay, that has been kind of the worst idea ever. Some evil being seems to think it’d be lots of fun to perform a drum concert on his temples, because they fucking _thumps_. Groaning, Kaito holds his head between his hands. It hurts. As in, fucking really hurts. Too much that it takes him at least a whole minute to realize that a) he's still naked in bed with an equally naked stranger, b) he’s just yanked himself from the asleep stranger who had been using him as a pillow and is obviously looking for the source of comfort that had disappeared out of sudden and c) his head isn’t the only thing that bloody hurts.

A shiver runs down his spine, and he needs at least two seconds to normally breathe again. And, ouch, do his hips hurt. What the hell had he been doing the night before? Riding a bull? Grimacing, he takes the sheets off and puts them aside. He doesn’t need to look down to know there are no boxers covering him. He gets up and—

And finds something he hates more than his enormous hangover right now.

Madly blushing, Kaito tries to ignore the awkward, uncomfortable sensation of cold semen dripping down his thighs as he looks for his dispersed clothes. Fortunately, it seems that they were shy enough to reach the bedroom still with his underwear on, because his boxers are under the bed. Thank God. He’d not have to go naked around… Whose house is he in, again? Straightening, Kaito decides it would do no harm to just take a peek and — and his underwear falls again to the floor.

The dark brown blur he saw before was hair. Well brushed, usually perfectly organized hair, although it is exactly just as disheveled as Kaito’s now — except that stubborn lock that always insists on standing out, obviously. The jaw is relaxed, giving the cheeks, along with a slight blush, the aspect of being chubbier. His bangs are partly stuck to his forehead and partly down, covering closed eyes. Behind those fluttering eyelids, Kaito knows that lies the most azure eyes he’s ever seen, always piercing and intense and breathtaking and fucking perfect when smugly looks at him (both in reality and his wet dreams, truth be admitted). His lips are half-parted, releasing small puffs of air every now and then that are giving Kaito the desire of just leaning down and joining their lips and then taking his hands into the game and _you have to stop and get your pitiful ass out of there, Kaito. You’re so screwed and you need to leave before he wakes up, you idiot._

After mentally slapping himself, Kaito bends down to pick up his boxers again, and unsuccessfully ignoring the still uncomfortable feeling of sticky semen running down his legs, he promptly takes off, decided to sneak out as silently as he can in. Or, well, that was the plan. Sounded like a great plan. Except that he may or may not have stumbled over a pair of pants and a shirt on his way to the bathroom, and then over three different furniture on his way out of the bedroom — but he kind of found his pants lying on one of them, so he can’t really complain, because it’d have been terribly embarrassing having had to go home only with a pair of boxers on. Thanks, damn chair that's in the middle of the corridor because of no reason other than hitting pinky toes.

He jumps off the last tread, thanking whatever is up there too for having found his shirt at some point along the way. Buttoning up the garment, he leads to the front door, not really caring about the jacket he's almost completely sure he picked last night before leaving his house. He can live without that thing; his pride, nevertheless, he’d like to remain that as intact as it's currently possible.

And then he kind of passed by the front of the kitchen, and suddenly leaving doesn’t sound that urgent anymore. What are the odds of anyone waking up if they haven’t already after all the racket he’s already done?

He's midway of assaulting the fridge when something catches his attention. Frowning, Kaito slowly turns around, and then he learns to never underestimate odds, because a very shirtless, very flushed, very just-awakened, very _damn sexy_ Kudou Shinichi is standing under the door frame, lips parted in a yawn that Kaito rapidly associates with a cat’s meow and a hand scratching the disheveled locks of his nape. And then Kaito finds out it has been the worst idea ever to just guess he wasn’t going to wake up, because of course Kudou Shinichi — the very drooling-over version of Tantei-kun — would wake up in a ridiculously childish way that inexplicably showed all his sex appeal just to find Kaito — Kaito, with his shirt bad-buttoned and out of his pants and with a way-too-long sausage on his mouth — rummaging on his fridge. _Of fucking course._

Somehow the time seems to freeze, surely due to Kudou’s shock at finding an undoubtedly stranger going through his stuff, and Kaito kind of tries to use that amount of time to bite the sausage on his mouth and take it out to look like more of, you know, an _actual human_. They stares at each other, Kaito chewing and internally crying — because, damn it, does Kudou look cute with his head tilted and his eyes shining with curiosity — while considering if he could make it out of this behaving like a normal human being and without embarrassing himself more, again.

He had a plan. Involved a polite offer to have breakfast together, a polite talk about last night (or, well, as far as he remembers. Which is exiting his house and entering the bar) and a polite apologize for… well, for everything. All politely admitted in society’s polite code. He is such a polite gentleman.

Then the stupidly idiot of Kudou’s sexy self had to open his too-pink mouth, and Kaito remembered why politeness is so out of this matter.

“He—”

A puff of pink smoke blows up in the middle of the kitchen, cutting off Kudou’s sentence. The detective coughs and tries to cover his mouth and nose with his hand, and Kaito, as the coward he is, drops to his knees with a mask put out of nowhere (it’s not like he’s going to give away where he put the mask out from. This might be his point of view, but he’s still a magician, this is still his trick, and he’s going to reveal nothing) covering his face and crawls towards the kitchen’s door. He masterfully manages to slide under Kudou’s legs without the detective noticing, and internally he scolds himself because _why can’t you as masterfully hold an actual, civil, serious conversation like normal people? You’re a dishonor, Kaito, a disgrace to your specie._

He has barely straightened back to his two legs when he hears something hitting the floor with a thump, and then the thought that the smoke bomb may or may not contain sleeping gas comes to his mind. Oops.

Kaito shrugs because, well, there's nothing he can do now, is it? Surely Tantei — _Meitantei_ — will be just fine. The guy has survived bullet wounds. A bump will be nothing for him.

Proud of his own discovery, he nods to his reasoning. Yeah, the guy will be alright, the bump will eventually fade and they both (Kaito, especially Kaito. He has to face that detective on heists, damn it. Kudou may not know his civil persona, but sure as hell Kaito _does_ ) will forget whatever happened between them two — that _anything_  at all had happened between them two. Best plan ever.

And as if there weren’t a knocked out guy behind his back with a possible concussion, Kaito starts looking for his shoes.

He has to take some advantage on Kudou’s faint, doesn’t he?

* * *

Now Kaito understands those poor girls who spend the night at random guys’ houses and then people give them suspicious looks on their way home in the morning. He's aware his hair is still a mess, his clothes are mostly wrinkled and he walks a little bit weird, and kind of can understand the gazes a couple of elderly people gave him, but definitely doesn’t need all those assholes who look at him for way too much time with those disgusting smirks on their smug faces. Sure, he scared them away from the Kudou Manor to the subway — but his head still hurts as the Sun has just worsened his hangover, and at some point he just opted for dismissing them and putting on his earphones. Except that, when he reached his pocket, he found out he didn’t have them because _of course, Kaito, who would bring earphones at a bar? That was a ridiculous idea and you’re not idiot enough to do it. You’re an idiot who sleeps with their detective rivals but not idiot enough to bring earphones. That’s your life. Deal with it._

Fortunately, Aoko isn’t waiting for him when he gets home. Which is strange, because it's almost lunch time and the girl always drops by his house to make sure he eats more than just take outs as, according to her, he’d eat chocolate to death, and if that didn’t kill him, then the starvation would do, because he's idiot enough not to eat anything without a considerable amount of glucose enough to kill an elephants herd within it and too lazy to go find his own food. He's glad Aoko is probably too busy with her new girlfriend to remember about his well-being. His head is killing him and he seriously needs a shower. And some sleep. Sleep which doesn't end up with Kudou Shinichi beside him on the bed, both naked, and strange, sticky fluids dripping down his thighs, thank you very much.

A shiver runs down his spine at the memory, and Kaito decides that a nap can wait if he gets to rid of the remains of semen that are still ruining his boxers. (Not that he cares; he's going to burn those boxers to ashes and then use those ashes for barbecues and then destroy the barbecue. But still, it's kind of uncomfortable.)

It is the worst shower ever. Apparently someone thought it was a good idea to cut off the water for no reason during the amount of time he has been out, and the water is somewhere between Antarctic-ish cold and ice-cube-ish cold. Which doesn’t sit well with his sore muscles and the already bitter feeling of cold semen stuck on both his legs. _Ugh_. He spends like one full hour under a cascade of frozen water trying to rub the mess off until the point that, when he comes out of the shower, his poor appendages are either red or in pain or both.

To cap it all, seems like Tantei-kun is a dirty little sadist deep inside, because suspicious bruises have appeared on definitely very private zones of his skin out of nowhere, and casually have some finger-ish shapes. Seriously, if he hadn’t made a shame out of himself less than three hours before and had no secret identity to keep, he’d go back to that damn house and slap Tantei-kun until he had exactly the same bruises as him. Because, okay, he can deal with those ones who are all over his chest — that, right, maybe are excessive, but possible to cover. But the very noticeable, very attention-attracting, wide purple circle that's on his neck, strategically located over where his pulse beats? How is he supposed to cover that hellish hickey _in the middle of spring_? He can already see — and _feel_ — Aoko punching and then interrogating him (because she's one of those whose motto is “hit first, ask later”).

Kaito exits the bathroom and enters his room, a towel around his neck and the cleanest pair of boxers he could find covering what no one is seeing in the next let’s say ten years or so. When he get over the trauma of waking up naked beside an equally naked full version of someone who still has a seven-years-old body in his mind. Ugh. His hangover gets a hundred times worse whenever he thinks about that.

Huffing, the magician lets himself fall back on his bed. His sore muscles complain, but Kaito can’t find at this point any word strong enough to accurately express how much of an underwater fuck he gives. Instead, he grabs the first cushion beyond his reach — the one with a picture of some Thai BL show his mother gifted him last Christmas after her trip to Thailand — and places it on his face. He’d think later about the fact he has two shirtless men at bare millimeters of his face.

His hangover seems to calm down a bit as the sleep sneaks in his system, and Kaito isn’t in a good position to stop it from numbing his senses and making him fall asleep. It doesn’t even occur to him that he hasn’t checked his phone since the night before and that it lies uncharged over his bedside table.

* * *

 _Control. The lips over his prevent him from taking control. The hands at either side of his body, palms flushed with the wall, prevent him from going away — from flipping them, from_ taking control _. Those hands are doing devilish things to his body without even touching him. His own hands are on the other’s hips, pulling him closer, closer, closer. Never is close enough. He wants more, more, more of that touch._

_Heat. The body over his emits heat, heat that surrounds him and makes him breathless, sweaty, a limp mess against a cold wall. The hands that haven't even touched him torture his sanity. So close. They are so close, and at the same time so far from him. He wants them — wants them to touch him, to caress him, to divest him from all those layers of clothes that make the heat concentrate within his body._

_Teeth find his bottom lip before mouths part with a wet sound. Gasps fill the air of the corridor where two silhouettes are one over the other, forehead against forehead and trying to catch their breaths. He can barely distinguish the smell of alcohol mixed with some minty toothpaste, the last one itching at his nose. It is refreshing. It is attracting. It is driving him_ crazy _._

_The hands move, and Kaito nearly jumps when they touch his exposed neck. Despite the heat, they feel cold. It's probably because his own body is on fire. The touch heads down first. Fingers go through his collarbone, ever so slowly and gently caressing the skin under the hem of his shirt. His own hands wander over the other’s waist at the same time, his fingers tracing over the belt before disappearing under the pants at the other’s lower back. Kaito feels how the body over his shivers and holds his breath as the magician’s fingers takes the shirt out of the pants and his hands sneak in under the garment._

_The hands on his neck move up as his owns do the same. His touch is welcomed by slight curves — abs, Kaito notices — and soft skin, body heat emanating from the stomach that slightly but unsteadily goes up and down._

_Hands reach his cheeks meanwhile. Calloused palms caress the flesh, moving back and up, up, up until fingers get lost on the hair behind his ear and just the thumbs are on his face. They go across his jawline and stop at the edge of his sockets. The breath that ghosts over his lips moves up and down, as if the owner has just examined his face; curiosity gets the best of Kaito, and finds himself fluttering his eyes open and directly drowning into two pools of infinite azure that take his breath away almost as much as the kiss has done._

_He gulps. The intensity of that gaze is way too overwhelming, staring at him so fixedly he feels himself shivering under a sudden wave of nervousness. Slowly, millimeter per second, the other leans in again. Kaito licks his lips, eyes diverging from those deadly eyes to swollen, red lips and back. Mouth touches mouth, chaste and skin-deeply, and the Hell blows up inside Kaito’s chest again._

_His hands travel once more, increasing the pace as the same time the kiss becomes harder, heater, and at some point his fingers find incredibly easy to just press on that lower back and bring the other’s hips flush against his. And now that those hands aren’t against the wall supporting the weight, their bodies collide together completely._

_Kaito throws his head back, his lips too occupied releasing embarrassing sounds to keep kissing. His head spins, the sensation of hot lips going through his sweaty jawline and down his neck making his mind dizzy; his hips grinding against the other’s, his pants growing tighter around his groin, teeth that sink on his neck and make him whimper when he desperately rubs against—_

“BAKAITO!”

Indigo eyes fly open, and then the unmanliest squeak ever heard in this world resounds as Kaito throws the scary view of two men kissing right under his nose at what intended to be the other side of the room, only to be welcomed by a scariest view of an annoyed Aoko taking the cushion away from her own face, her usually messy hair more disheveled now, and Kaito can perfectly hear himself whimpering because he's so dead. Aoko is frowning, has a weapon — a cushion is a weapon in that girl’s hands, okay? — and he has three big problems that wouldn’t let him go away as fast as he’d like to, which means Aoko would get him sooner or later (probably sooner because, damn, that girl is in shape).

He’ll forever deny having squeaked, though. Priorities clear; pride first, life later.

“Ahoko!” he screams back, and then his head so unkindly reminds him why he’d fallen asleep in first place.

Right. His hangover. Sore muscles. Culprit: Kudou Shinichi. Yeah. Kudou’s naked body beside him. Kudou’s pretty hot, pretty good-looking, pretty sexy body pressed against his in a corridor. Kudou’s lips on his and—

_Oh, God. Kaito, you need to calm down. And a cold shower. Probably two. Let’s take three, just in case._

Kaito straightens, placing as discretely as it's humanly possible his hands between his legs because, in case someone has forgotten, he's in boxers. Only boxers.

“How did you get in here?”

Aoko shrugs, her head tilting a little to the side and making her unfashionably disheveled hair cup her face in a way that Kaito can only describe as abominably too cute for someone who has just broken into an almost naked guy’s room. “The door was open,” she replies, matter-of-factly.

Kaito frowns. “No, it wasn’t. I closed it.”

The girl lifts one arm, all smiley and smirking and fucking scary because this is Aoko and Aoko is worth fearing, and shows him her palm. She shakes her wrist, emitting a tinkling that attracts Kaito’s attention. “It was once I used this.”

“Where the hell have you got a copy of my keys from?!” he shouts, reaching out to grab the keyring from Aoko’s devilish hands.

The girl backs up before he can even touch her, her feet elegantly tip-toeing back, and his pitiful self ends up in a pretty not-so-elegantly way spread out on the floor. Internally, he hopes that flash he’s caught in the middle of his hangover’s revenge wasn't from Aoko’s phone camera, because he's neither economically nor psychologically prepared for yet another blackmail.

“Your mom gave me them when she came here last Christmas,” she responds. “Wanted to make sure you don’t set the house on fire because you fell asleep while heating Yakisoba on the microwave. Again.”

“That was only once,” he retorts. After having picked up the remains of pride left — zero — Kaito stands and sits on his bed, legs and arms crossed in an unmanly, outraged way that definitely doesn’t suit someone who's wearing puppy-spotted boxers. “Besides, I’m an all grown-up man, you know? I don’t need _anyone_ babysitting me.”

Aoko rolls her eyes, all beautiful and cute and so unhelpful, and states sarcastically, “Which is why you haven’t picked your phone the twenty three times I called you. Obviously. So responsible.”

“First of all,” Kaito says, raising one finger, “no battery. Second of all—” Another finger up, “—who said I gotta pick up each and every one of your calls? Third of all,” he continues, raising his ring finger as well as his tone so Aoko can’t interrupt him, “that doesn’t give you the right to break into my house. I’m a man, you know? Want to have some privacy.”

“That doesn’t.” She raises her hand again, showing the keys once more with that smug face of hers that makes Kaito want to do so un-friend-like things. “These do, though. Also, if what you don’t want me to see is the little problem — and I mean really _little_ ; seriously, nothing to hide there — between your legs, don’t worry. I’ve no interest in what you were dreaming about or…” Her eyes travel towards the forgotten cushion on the floor, and Kaito can perfectly see how the corners of her mouth fight against the smirk that wants to place itself there, “... whatever you were doing.”

“That was—!”

“No interest,” Aoko interrupts, being the one sixty-five meters tall of shit that she is.

Kaito groans. This is way too much for his hangover. He needs to rest, not to put up with his annoying childhood best friend and all her stupid beauty. This is his fault, actually. He had wished not to wake up beside Kudou, but didn't say a thing about Aoko. His bad. Mental note for next time — _and there’s not going to be a next time, Kaito. Because you’re not hooking up with Kudou again and you’re cutting down on alcohol for the next three months minimum. No hangovers and no attention-attracting hickies on your neck. Now deal with Aoko. This is your punishment._

“Why’s your phone off, anyway?” Aoko asks. She picks up the cushion and sits beside Kaito on the bed, her arms squeezing the fluffy thing.

“Told you; no battery.” Kaito shrugs. “I kind of forgot to plug it before going to sleep. Sorry if I worried you.”

“Who’d be worried about you, Bakaito?” she spits, her finger hitting Kaito’s forehead. “Just did it for your mom. You better make it up for me; got to leave my girlfriend alone, ya know?” Despite trying to look annoyed, Aoko smiles, and Kaito kind of wants to cry because it's just so unfair to look so angelical when she's the little daughter of the devil himself.

Kaito huffs and runs a hand through his hair before standing up. “Yeah, yeah. Whatever you say. You can sit your big, heavy ass on my poor bed while I cook you my famous Yakisoba.”

Aoko grimaces and throws him the cushion before he can even exit the room. Then, she stands up too, passing Kaito by before he could complain because thanks to her free attack he’d hit his head against the wall. And, hello, the hangover is still there.

“I don’t wanna die, thank you very much,” Aoko shouts from the living you.

The magician sighs and follows her. When he catches up, Aoko has already made herself at home and is shoving the landline in his direction. “Takeouts, then?”

“Takeouts,” she agrees.

* * *

Aoko doesn’t find out about his hickey. Kaito entrusts that to his acting skills and the fact that four whole days has passed and he's still alive. It should be recorded as a record, to be honest. He has to thank the unfashionable kerchief style coming back that season (and his mother’s annoying habit of always keeping everything because, you know, ‘just in case’) and Aoko’s sudden conjunctivitis attack to her right eye, though, as her sight is currently as good as his Universal Culture prof's, and she can barely tell things apart by colors.

All in all, everything seems to fluid just normal, and he's starting to think he's ready to come back to the Alcohol-Provoked Situation Which Unwantedly Lead To Extremely Intelligent Detective’s Bed And Posterior Sex Incident previous lifestyle. As Kudou’s annoyingly handsome face hasn’t showed up at his front door by now, he suspects that a) he's not interested in finding the man who knocked him out on his own kitchen with a sleeping-gassed smoke bomb and putting him in jail due to aggression, or b) he doesn’t have enough clues to track Kaito down. Whichever it is, Kaito is just fine with either of them. Kudou-free life equal to happy life.

He still has dreams, though. Very wet, very explicit, very moans-full dreams. He isn’t precisely happy waking up each and every day with a hardness higher than the Everest and having to take cold showers three times in less than thirty minutes to cool his — unwanted and provoked — morning mood down, but he can deal with it. What's killing him is the fact that he can’t remember how things led from ‘hey, my best friend left me alone for my birthday so I’m gonna drink my brains out to forget my misery’ to ‘hey, I ended up in this random guy’s bed after he was the one fucking my brains out to forget my misery’. Kudou’s dick stuck up his ass? Sure, he has pretty vivid images of that. His pitiful self approaching Kudou (because truth be told, Kudou would never ever in all his corpse-filled life go talk to a random stranger on a bar to bring him to his house and fuck him. It's Kudou we're talking about. Kaito even had doubted he was sexually attracted to anything that didn’t involve lots of blood and forensics and piano wires before he actually found himself full of Kudou’s active sexuality’s proof) and singing out how his love life sucked since Kaitou KID? Nope — but that does sound like something his drunk self would do.

Groaning, Kaito lets himself sink deeper into his kerchief cloth as his feet keep walking toward the University’s cafeteria. Aoko made him promise he’d help her with her chemistry essay because — and quoted — she’d find another idiot that would help her otherwise and then she’d know how to prepare cyanide and she still has his house keys and Hakuba would always help her to hide the unwanted corpses. So, as he had been avoiding Hakuba (just in case the idiot stared at him long enough to notice the purple bruise half-hidden by his kerchief. Hakuba may be an idiot, but he's still annoyingly good at noticing undesirable, uninteresting things that wouldn’t attract the rest of the people’s attention) purposefully since _that night_ , and as he's still quite attached to his life, he couldn’t turn her down.

The cafeteria is unreasonably far away from Kaito’s faculty and unfairly super near from everything else. Kaito deeply interprets it as the universe’s punishment for his laziness at getting a driving licence thinking that he could always take advantage of Aoko in that aspect — which turned out to be the worst idea ever since Aoko has no intention of taking a detour so he doesn’t have to walk two whole kilometers. Then again, somehow the torture is worthy. Who knows where they get the cakes from, but Kaito is pretty sure they have a summoning area rather than a kitchen, because those damn things taste like something prepared especially to make people sin.

By the time he opens the cafeteria door, Aoko is already sat on the third table to the left, twitching a pen between her teeth. She had ordered one of those strawberry frappuccinos with cream all over it and is thrusting oreo brownies into her mouth as if there were no tomorrow, and internally Kaito wonders why the hell she goes to the gym if every calorie she manages to lose she’d put on later multiplied three times. Nevertheless, he says nothing as he pops himself beside her and steals one of those brownies, ignoring Aoko’s outraged face. All in all, she looks kind of cute with those chubby cheeks all spotted with chocolate and a slight pink blush — and that maybe is Kaito’s not-that-past crush speaking by itself and _mental note: slap yourself later. Not now, because approximately all these people attend the annual ‘Everybody thinks Kaito is a lunatic’ meeting, but you’ll do once you’re all alone in your solitude in your lonely house because your crush was never reciprocated. No couple for you, Kaito. Friendzone is your place._

Aoko takes the pen out of her mouth, her blue eyes narrowly fixed on his face, and points at him with the damn thing close enough to his eye to see she needs to buy a new one because she's running out of ink. “That was my brownie,” she says, her bottom lip spotted with chocolate standing out.

Kaito shrugs, as if ‘Aoko’ and ‘chocolate’ and ‘her lips’ on the same sentence don’t wake up any deep desire he obligues himself to hit with a hammer anytime it pops up. “Exactly — was. Past tense. Meaning: no longer _is_. You’re the one studying English philology, Aoko, you should know the basic tenses and how to use them properly.”

Her eyes narrow even more, the one red with conjunctivitis twitching as her eyebrow does something weird between going up, down and the centre. “I’ve a pen, though, and I do know how to use it properly.” And as if to prove her point, she thrusts the pen into his eye.

A high pitched noise pretty alike those ones Princess Peach makes when she's being kidnapped by Browser sounds on the cafeteria, and Kaito will forever deny he squeaked like a damsel in distress when a mouse pops up. To the fifty people who are currently having breakfast and looking at him with faces from ‘what the fuck happened?!’ to ‘oh, Kaito happened’, that’s it.

He's an event himself.

Rubbing his eye, for both the pain and the tears because _people are not even worried she pecked your eye, they’re relieved it was just you!_ , Kaito clears his throat and scolds her. “Damn it, Aoko! It’s not my fault your eye looks like shit and you’re jealous at other people who have both their beautiful eyes healthy. Deal with it!”

Her eye twitches again, and this time Kaito worries about his well being because it has been the healthy one. He can hear himself gulping. “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard and I’m starting to think I should just ask someone else for help and poison you with cyanide. Why don’t I do that, again?”

Kaito looks at her with puppy eyes, his bottom lip standing out in a pout he hopes is convincing. “Because I’m your beautiful, cute, lovely, adorable childhood best friend and you would never hurt me because you love me?”

“Try again,” she replies, unamused.

“Because I understand chemistry and will practically write your essay because you’re useless at it?”

Aoko still looks beautiful with her cheeks spotted with chocolate when she smirks, leaning back on her chair and crossing her arms under her nonexistent breasts. She's still as flat as a thirteen years old, and Kaito cries inside because he still finds it endlessly cute and is going to die because the only thing currently _straight_ on Aoko is her chest.

“See? Wasn’t that hard to use your brain for once, was it?”

Kaito just nods, thinking about if it’d be too hard to cut his veins with the brownies’ wrapping and if the cafeteria’s owner would mind him flooding the place with his tears. Most likely, as he’d probably ruin the little pieces of Hell he called cakes.

One hour and a half later, Kaito is seriously starting to consider whether or not put down his name on the essay rather than Aoko’s. He looks at her again, her annoyingly cute face focused on her phone, damn lovely smiling at whatever someone — her girlfriend, probably — is telling her. Kaito isn’t jealous. He's just annoyed because he's spending a precious time writing down Aoko’s essay which she should be doing, and there she's, ignoring him because she's in love with some random girl who doesn’t know her since they were seven years old and isn’t writing her chemistry essay and hadn’t spend her birthday alone because Aoko abandoned her for someone else who apparently was more important — and he isn’t jealous, okay? At all. Just unamused.

His right eye twitches again, though, when Aoko receives yet another message and smiles wider, her teeth trapping her bottom lip as she moves her legs again while rapidly typing a quick response. The sound of a new message followed after approximately fifteen milliseconds since the ‘sent’ one only makes Kaito’s tic worse. Does that girl not have any other friends? Going by how Aoko talks about her she has to be a Victoria’s Secret model’s daughter mushed with some Calvin Klein model genes, surely one seventy meters tall, naturally blonde and blue-eyed, sizes 60-90-60 and perfect trunk-legs equilibrium. She has to have friends. Any friends. Why does she respond so quickly?

Aoko types a few more words before miraculously speaking to an actual, real, 3D being. “Hey, Kaito,” she calls out, her healthy eye slightly looking at him while the one with conjunctivitis is apparently watching in case the tow truck takes away her nonexistent car. “Do you have something planned until lunch time?”

“Other than finishing your essay?” he bitterly asks — and then smiles because Aoko is frowning, which means she's mad, and a mad Aoko is never good news. So, safe plan: to feign he's super happy writing the essay. “Nope. Why do you ask?”

His beautifully dreadful best friend’s expression relaxes again, and Kaito is starting to think she does that most likely just to blackmail and control him. Which works just perfectly, by the way. “My babe is heading here with a friend of hers right now, so I’m taking this opportunity to introduce you both.”

Oh, great. Well, shit.

Kaito’s desire of meeting Mrs. Little Piece of Perfection Made Human by the Gods and Any Other Imaginable Celestial Being Existing Up There is pretty much zero. Probably less. Were negative numbers be accepted, then less. But before he can come up with a proper lie to save his pitiful ass from a very long, very chocolate-ice-cream-and-tears-full night, Aoko gets up and stretches before telling him she's going to the toilet. (And thank God, because Kaito isn’t the best working under pressure — outside of his heists, that’s it. He’d most likely end up stuttering something about his hamster dying and him having to assist the funeral, and he doesn’t even have a hamster to begin with! He wants one, though. Chubby-cheeked. He's going to name it Aonichi Spectrum — because the damn thing will surely be adorable until it betrays him and bites his finger.)

Muttering a complaint under his breath, Kaito leans back on his chair, his fingers furiously typing on Aoko’s laptop keyboard while his eyebrows do something complicated between twitching and wrinkling, and he's pretty sure the waiter behind him is seriously starting to think about calling the police because it just isn’t normal to keep talking to yourself about ways of killing your may-or-may-not-romantically-interested best friend with a fork and whether you still have time to become a magician after a couple of years in prison or not. Nevertheless, he can’t find out how hard it’d be to illegally travel to another country and change his face and name and start all over again, because a) that's way too drastic and dramatic, and now that he thinks about it kind of stupid, since he could always run away before that girl arrives and think of an excuse later, and b) the second option of running away isn’t available anymore since the door has been opened and with Kaito’s luck it’d most likely be Aoko’s girlfriend — which is stupid too because, does he know how the girl even looks like? _Surely an epitome of Shakira and Beyoncé mushed together._

He doesn’t recognize the girl. She's beautiful and stunning, and has a long, brown hair that shines and looks like one of those Pantene’s commercials' when the air blows and the girl is all like ‘oh, yeah, give me more’, and her big, sparkling, captivating purple-ish eyes are definitely the correct measure to match with her slightly chubby, pink-inked cheeks — and Kaito’s chest hurtfully wrinkled because she's awesome and lovely and just obvious her personality will be just as breathtaking as her aspect, and he cannot compete with that. He has to admit, however, the girl’s unfair beauty isn’t that important anymore when his eyes move a little to her left and—

Oh.

_Oh._

As discreetly as a penguin trying to dance breakdance, Kaito drags himself under the table with the grace of a pregnant woman. He hits his head with the table and lets the chair down, and _you’ve let me down too, not just that damn chair. You’re so screwed, Kaito. You’re so screwed and you’re pitiful and there’s no way you’re coming out of here alive, because Aoko is here and her unreasonably stunning girlfriend is here and Kudou is here and they’re going to kill you because you took advantage of the poor guy while he was drunk and then drugged him with sleeping gas at his own house while eating his food and that’s neither polite nor morally acceptable. Say your last wish — and no, food is out of the table!_

 _Okay_ , Kaito tells himself. _Think of a way of escaping from an extremely intelligent detective who may or may not be the only one capable of coming near enough the magnificently very uncatchable, very unapproachable, very unreachable Kaitou KID to actually have put handcuffs on his wrists once._ A voice inside his head pretty unkindly reminds him that it’s actually been twice, if the bruises that are just disappearing after four days of wearing very fluorescent, very attention-attracting bracelets so Aoko wouldn’t notice are something to go by. He was just about to scold himself because a) he should not be thinking about that in this kind of situation, and b) handcuffs around his wrists are… a thought. A thought he should so not be having while hiding under a table from his most lately failure, who he may or may not be imagining naked — and he's going to stop now, because Naked Kudou is something not allowed to come to his mind. Outside of dreams, that’s it.

But then Kudou moved and pointed toward the table he's hiding under and, okay, that might have been quite attention-attracting. Enough to make him keep Naked-Kudou thoughts for later.

Removing any indecent and/or remotely inappropriate vague idea that could remain on his not-at-all perverted and rotten brain (and maybe just _postponing_ — I mean, it isn’t that extreme situation, is it? Then again, it actually is. _Rotten soul_ ), Kaito takes a deep breath and gones all in four. He only has to go through the whole cafeteria without a five-sense-activated, fly-flight-detecting detective noticing a twenty-one years old all grown-up man sliding along the floor. Not that hard.

 _Alright_ , Kaito encourages himself. _You can do this. According to the coefficient of friction and airspeed, calculating Kudou’s height and his capacity of definitely running faster than you are able to crawl, and the length of those legs that fell surprisingly smooth to the touch, if your alcohol-blurred memories are anything to go by—_

_Oh, I’m fantasizing with his legs. Great. Well, screw everything._

Sheepishly ass up, Kaito starts slithering between the tables. He's being discreet. More or less. I mean, all those stares are just poor university students bored with university things that have nothing better to do than sticking their noses where they don’t belong. It has nothing to do with him being attention-attracting.

He's just five tables and a pair of door away from his freedom, and just when he's internally crying and sobbing because _how can he be five tables away when he’s been sitting three tables away from the door_ , he feels something ungently hitting his side. Five seconds, a burning feeling and the strong scent of hot chocolate later does he realize that it's a _someone_ rather than a something — and damn straight all those stares have nothing to do with him being attention-attracting. Because if he's really that noticeable, then of course the waiter must have noticed a fucking guy crawling on the floor.

He does not. He stumbles over Kaito, tray no longer in hand because it lands innocently on one side, shiny and silver and blindly clean and so damn empty because all its contents are mathematically spread out so they cover Kaito’s body from head to toe, and the waiter just stays there, carelessly and face flushed with the floor, while fifty-two pairs of eyes focus on the very pitiful of Kaito himself.

Kaito isn’t entirely sure where he is. For a moment, while his eyes follow the legs the pair of feet before him belongs to, he's pretty sure he can place himself somewhere between ‘uh, I’m covered in food in front of fifty people’ and ‘uh, I’m covered in _hot chocolate_ ’, and things doesn’t seem that bad, really. That is until his eyes actually take in the human being standing before him and somehow his location mutates from ‘uh, out of all things, hot chocolate isn’t a bad thing to be covered in” to another somewhere between ‘uh, I’m embarrassingly covered in food in front of fifty people’ to ‘uh, I’m embarrassingly covered in food in front of _Kudou Shinichi_ ’ — and this time there isn’t a safe, comfortable spot he can place himself in and come out from with his dignity intact.

 _Crawl back_ , his mind tells him. _Act like you haven’t seen him and slowly back up_. But that isn’t precisely an actual option when Kudou’s deep, intense, azure blue eyes are staring fixedly at him, brows furrowed in confusion and concentration, and Kaito's staring back and the guy isn’t an idiot to actually believe they aren’t having a staring contest right now, so Kaito is going to stay right where he is, covered in hot chocolate and jam toasts and a frozen frappuccino that's strategically placed on his ass as the cake cherry.

Kudou doesn’t really do anything for a whole minute. He blinks a couple of times, analyzing eyes going over Kaito’s body from head to toe at least twice before the sight of chocolate dripping down his hair and cream on his ass sinks in, the unfairly stunning girl still looking breathtaking and standing beside him, clung at his arm and curiously tilting her head aside while also trying to take into the picture before her, her silky hair falling aside from one of her elbows. Then, his eyes widen with recognition, his brows going so up his forehead the thought they’s met with his hairline pops up in Kaito’s head. Kudou’s mouth opens, the girl beside him diverging her gaze between one another in a way that definitely isn’t adorable but looked unreasonably cute on her, and Kaito is pretty sure he's ready to hand his balls over to Kudou and let him juggle with them while he fucking takes off directly to Hell.

“Shinichi?” the girl beside him asks, looking beautiful and innocent and confused — but especially beautiful — and Kaito just feels like crying again because even her voice is soft and it's just not fair. “What’s going on? Do you know him?”

Kudou finally averts his gaze from Kaito to focus on the gorgeous girl who Kaito is smart enough to identify as his best friend Ran, because she seems extremely polite to be addressing a guy by his first name and Kaito has disguised as her before and maybe she's more mature now, but her boobs seem to be exactly the same size as before.

He's sure Kudou is about to answer her when another voice pops up out of nowhere, and Kaito is seriously thinking about hugging his recently discovered ostrich roots because he feels the sudden desire of burying his head on the floor and never take it out ever again.

“Ran!” Aoko exclaims from the toilet door, a stupidly happy smile placed on her even more stupidly cute face and matching her ever-so-stupidly pink-colored cheeks. She approaches them, her trainsuited covered legs — because she has no sense of fashion whatsoever and still manages to look cute, all unfashioned and stuff — coming to a stop when she finds herself in front of a chocolate and cream mess. Her blue eyes blink while she takes into the picture in front of her, and when she actually acknowledges the food mess as her-best-friend mess her face lights up in recognition and relief. Like, it isn’t any other idiot covered in food on the floor all in four. It's her idiot. It's way less alarming. “Kaito, what are you doing on the floor?”

Kaito internally cries because a) she isn’t ever worried that he has had a tray emptied over and the poor waiter hasn’t still stood up (he's slightly preoccupied about him, to be honest. Not enough to stop embarrassing himself, though), and b) she has just said his name and Kudou is smugly smiling, and Aoko is way too oblivious and innocent to notice she’s just screwed Kaito’s life in approximately two hundred different ways just giving away that little piece of information, because Kudou is a little shit smart enough to make out a lot of things from that knowledge alone. He's good at making out things. And his hormones add, gleefully, _And_ with _things_.

Although scared, Kaito is man enough to look at Kudou while that damn shitty smile spreads wider, trapping blue eyes shining mischievously and bedroom-positively evilly at a knelt, helpless magician whose biggest sin has been being born. “Kaitou… kun, eh?”

Kaito is so occupied self-pitying he misses the way Kudou rolls the last letter of his name.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> > _19/0/2018._ Mare felt like she liked present better than past, so she wasted her precious time rereading and changing 8000 words of verbal tenses.
>
>> _03/09/2018._ Grammar and spelling mistakes revised and corrected.


	2. 'Polite' is the new 'British and disgusting'

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ###  **Things you probably didn't notice on the previous chapter:**
>
>> • Aoko's studying English Philology, but the essay she asks Kaito to write is about Chemistry. In case you guys don't know, those two things have nothing to do with one each other. The thing is I really don't picture Aoko studying nothing related to Chemistry, but couldn't think about something else _and_ already had the cyanide threat done. In conclusion I decided Aoko's studying English Philology after quitting her previous career and Chemistry is the last subject she has left to pass.
>
>> • The reason why Kaito admires Shinichi so much at the beginning is because I intended to make his crush on Aoko a _tiny_ crush. Turned out the crush was massive and Kaito ended up like a bi disaster admiring people's cheeks and eyes.
>
>> • Scene two was both the hardest and the shortest. Somehow it took me a lot of time to make it natural.
>
>> • Kaito's reaction when the cafeteria doors open doesn't really make any sense because he actually didn't know Ran was Aoko's girlfriend — but everybody seemed to play along with it, so I didn't change it.
>
>> • Shinichi turned out much smugger than he really is. I blame it on Kaito's POV because he was freaking out. Shinichi is a piece of candy here.
>
>> • When I changed the verb tenses and added the notes at the end of the chapter, I putted down August instead of July. Still haven't changed it.
>
>> • Kaito and Shinichi didn't use a condom because I forgot — twice — they exist. [Zai](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ZaiBan2989/pseuds/ZaiBan2989) was the one who mentioned it. I'm blaming that on the alcohol and another little secret that will be revealed on Chapter 3.
> 
> * * *
> 
> I love that section, seroiusly. Has been my best idea ever xd
> 
> OMG, I CAN'T BELIEVE I FINISHED THIS! Seriously, this chapter ate half my life. I stuck in the same scene for, like, two weeks before deciding _fuck it_ and deleting everything. I'm, all in all, mostly satisfied. I couldn't completely connect with my comical side — but thanks to the lovely [helloimtrash](https://archiveofourown.org/users/helloimtrash/pseuds/helloimtrash) this is finished at least. Seriously, I feel like this chapter is more hers than mine. She helped me so much through this. I know I couldn't have finished this without her. Even if she thinks 'semen running down thighs' is explicit stuff :v
> 
> I think I don't really have much to add here. Just that thank you guys for being so patient and wait an eternity for me :c I know this is not my best work, but seriously the chapter drove me crazy. I'm planning many more interesting things for chapter 3~
> 
> Hope you can go through this without falling asleep xd
> 
> I'm positively swearing in Spanish by now, so.
> 
> ###  **Enjoy~!**

Someone would think there could be nothing worse than to wake up in an unknown bed beside a very unknown, very naked stranger and in extremely unknown circumstances because you’d been smart enough to throw your brains out — and probably your guts up — into alcohol the night before. That’s serious and bad stuff and people don’t want that to happen. Of course they don’t. And Kaito may be a weird specimen, but he likes to still consider himself a human being, so he supposed that his bad luck quota was filled until, at least, next month.

That doesn’t seem to be the case as Aoko chats with her hurtfully stunning girlfriend on the backseat of Kudou’s car and Kudou keeps being a handsome asshole with that _I-know-everything_ smirk of his and Kaito’s left to sulk in the passenger seat of Kudou’s car.

They turn around the corner where Mary’s Fish Market is — which Kaito unaffectionately calls Where Hell Opens and Rottenness Enter; WHORE, for short — and he suppresses a whine, because there’s a reason why he always avoids this street and Aoko knows it and still has lead them this way, and he’s starting to wonder if this is his punishment for ruining her life by being born or something. Kudou gives him what he surely thinks is a slight peek, and the polite thing to do would be feigning not having noticed it, but Kaito is so mad at that guy right now that he turns to look at him and frowns and sticks his tongue and then turns toward the window again, because that’s actually the most prideful thing he can do right now.

Aoko is giggling at something Mouri-chan said to her when he looks at her through the rear-view mirror, still beautifully cute in her _Love Live!_ tracksuit and with her hair tied up in pigtails. She hasn’t removed the brownie chocolate from her cheeks yet, and Kaito can only internally cry when Mouri-chan reaches out to rub a thumb over her face and Aoko blushes a furious shade of pink, and he wonders how that girl manages to look so innocent and cute and adorable when Kudou asks her which way should he go on a crossroad and Aoko points to the left.

Ignoring how he’s still covered in various chocolate flavors with different amounts of sugar, how his ass is wetting the upholstery due to strawberry cream and café au lait and the unfriendly gaze Kudou shot him at the cafeteria parking lot before he overlooked it and sank into the seat anyway, Kaito crosses his arms and drowns further on his seat, because everyone else but him in the car seems genuinely happy and that’s not fair.

“Is this the right way, Nakamori-san?” Kudou asks while maneuvering the car through a straight street and _why does he have to ask, uh? It’s a damn straight street, there’s no room to doubt here!_

Aoko stops whatever game she was playing with Mouri-chan’s hands (Kaito knows her well enough to know it’s just a poor excuse to touch her, and knowing Aoko goes that far to bring out her childish side just to have that girl touching her makes his inner chibi self sulk a little more) and leans forward between the passenger and the driver seats. “Yeah, right this way.” She points at the end of the street, which is probably the only straight thing in this scene right now, and points forward. “Turn right and we’ll be on Kaito’s street.”

Kudou hums and nods as if he had been there lots of times and had the street perfectly pictured on his mind, and Kaito shivers while wondering how much of that statement is true, because Kudou looks pretty sure of where he’s heading. Really sure. Too sure. _Extremely_ and _dreadfully_ sure.

Alarms go off on Kaito’s head — very red, very strenuous alarms which read ‘DANGER’ and ‘Protocol of Emergency Activated’ and ‘RETREAT’ and ‘Exit and cliff ahead. Step right this way, watch carefully’ — but he promptly turns them off when one of Kudou’s perfectly shaped eyebrows goes up upon feeling him stiffening beside him and Kaito tells himself there’s no way Kudou knows where he lives, because before the other night he didn’t even know his civil persona and after recovering from the existential crisis that had him sulking on his bed for half a day Kaito had looked for tracking devices on his clothes and had found nothing.

“Is there any café or something around here where we can hang out at for a while, Nakamori-san?” Kudou asks again, and Kaito is approximately another eyebrow-lifting and one of those too pink, too desirable lip-twitches away from demanding the guy why the hell he asks Aoko when he’s definitely looking at him. “You see, I’ve a lot of work to come back to. I didn’t sleep well on Friday night and then this headache kept bothering me during the rest of the weekend.”

Kaito’s brain is pretty low on sugar right now (ironic, since he’s actually covered in it), so the little bit of information that Kudou innocently and casually drops lasts at least twenty seconds more than what it actually should have lasted, and suddenly the statement is neither innocent nor casual and Kaito’s pretty sure the cherry jam over his face isn’t enough to cover up the heat that’s rising from his chest and very independently decides to settle down on his cheeks. He can practically hear his neck cracking at the velocity he turns it with and his teeth grinding as his eyes are welcomed by a single deep-blue, azure orb, and Kaito’s pretty sure there aren’t enough words to accurately describe the very hurtful, very bloody way he’s imagining to rip that eye away so Kudou can’t give him that look anymore.

Okay, so Kaito remembers him and the guy knows it. Kaito caught it quite a while ago. Somewhere between the process of taking breakfast off his clothes and explaining Aoko how he had ended up crawling on the floor with a knocked out waiter centimetres away and approximately eights toasts over him, Kaito had caught Kudou’s intense eyes on him and it’s not like that guy’s gaze is something you can ignore, now is it? It was simply obvious since then that Kudou recognized him — which just makes sense because he’d probably even seen the birthmark on Kaito’s right ass cheek, so it was just normal for him to remember the face of the guy he’d fucked less than a week before. Kaito understands that.

What he does _not_ understand is why the hell Kudou has to rub it in his face.

“Oh, yeah. There’s this place Kaito and I used to go when we were kids,” Aoko responds, all oblivious and innocent and angelical, and Kaito tries to think the right words to express how Kudou’s intentions aren’t either innocent or angelical without actually telling her he knows it because Kudou’s sleepless night has pretty much to do with the guy’s dick up his ass.

“I know I should’ve asked this before,” Kudou says, and this time Kaito knows he’s directly talking to him because he turns momentally toward him before fixing his gaze on the road again instead of peeking how close Kaito is from jumping out the car with each comment, “but you never got to tell me your name.”

Kaito knows he’s asking for his last name. Obviously. Because Kudou is a polite guy who politely addresses other polite people by the politeness code they live under and it’s not polite addressing someone you’ve just met by their first name _and he’s so perfectly polite I bet it was you who dragged him to bed, and still here you are, derogatory adjectiving him when you’re the naughty one. Rotten soul._

He bites down the, “I guess you know me well enough to call me Kaito, since, you know, you had your cock up my ass,” and settles for something more Aoko-friendly. “You can call me by my first name, it’s fine.”

It’s polite. He sounds polite. He’s actually being polite here and he’s pretty proud of himself because _you’ve been able to control that mouth of yours, Kaito. I’ll allow you to give yourself a snack once we get home._

Kudou isn’t buying it though, because he’s the politeness king and of course he has to politely ask for everything. “I’m afraid I’ve only known you for the last twenty minutes and I wouldn’t really feel comfortable in that situation.”

Aoko’s looking at him by the rear-view mirror by now, her gaze curious and her brow slightly frowned, and Kaito knows that denying to tell him would be at this rate, a) a real threat to his life given that Kudou has brought up the comfort thing and Aoko would never forgive him for making her girlfriend’s best friend uncomfortable, and b) suspicious, because he has really no reason to say no.

So, swallowing down the rest of his pride — which isn’t that much, really — he bitterly retorts, “Kuroba.”

Kaito knows he has one foot on jail and the other about to come in too when Kudou’s smug smirk turns into a triumphant one for approximately ten milliseconds and he shoots him a knowing look that says nothing and everything in possibly more languages Kaito’s familiar with — and believe him, he can defend himself in a lot of languages. They aren’t enough to defend himself from Kudou’s conspiratorial trial, though.

“Then, Kuroba-kun,” he begins, and Kaito has actually to stop the flush from reaching his ears upon the low, raw tone in which he practically purrs his name before briefly licking his lips (not clear enough for the girls to see it but long enough for an eagle-eyed to notice — and Kaito’s sight is pretty good). There’s something in the way he says his name, in the way he lets the ‘r’ and the ‘b’ roll down his tongue that makes Kaito feel like he’s _savoring_ him.

But of course that’s only his imagination, because neither Aoko nor Mouri-chan seems out for it or remotely suspicious by the tone, Aoko’s pinkeyed eye isn’t twitching yet, so Kaito suppresses the shiver that’s tickling his spinal cord and clears his throat before responding. “Yeah?”

“Where should I drop you?” Kudou must read something on his face — Kaito _knows_ he must read something; he’s just not sure what shade of confusion he’s wearing — before making his point clear. “I thought you may want some privacy to change clothes. And maybe we could go to the café first and, I don’t know, wait for you while ordering some stuff? I mean, Nakamori-san knows you — I mean, what you like and stuff — and you both know where the café is, so there should be no problem in you joining us later.”

Kaito blinks. Once, twice, thrice, and after furtively convincing himself his eyelids are _not_ windshield wipers, his brain somehow manages to register that, a) his mouth is open and he should probably close it before he starts drooling, and b) Kudou’s looking at him with expecting, questioning eyes, diverging his gaze from the road to Kaito and back, and Kaito vaguely remembers Kudou’s asked him something and realizes he’s probably waiting for an answer because _human beings usually want answers when they question, Kaito. It’s basic human communication. You’d know if you were a human and actually communicated._

There are lots of, “Hmm,” and, “Uh,” and a single, “Oh,” before Kaito’s brain cell connects with its fellow and a spark between the two seems to put Kaito’s vocal chords into function to say something pretty relatable to an intelligible sentence. “You can drop me here.”

Kudou looks startled for half a blink, probably because they’re not even near the end of the street where he’s supposed to turn to the right and Kaito’s still covered in multiple colors and flavors of the chocolate spectrum and one usually doesn’t want to go through an unknown number of metres in that circumstances for other people to see when they have both a car and a disposed driver to drop them off on their house’s door. Kaito supposses that’s part of his hesitation, while the other part may most likely be Mouri-chan’s kick for abandoning a defenseless, poor creature to their own devices.

Nevertheless, after two minutes of surely elaborating a detective, convincing reasoning that would change his life lately, Kudou simply shrugs and spins the wheel, maneuvering the car until it comes to a stop at one side of the road, without saying a word. Kaito somehow suspects it has something to do with the fact that at some point his eyes probably screamed his clear intention of jumping off the car in motion. Anyway, he’s glad Kudou remains silent and doesn’t ask more questions.

Aoko does though, because she’s a small ball of curiosity and distrust and likes to unnecessarily make things harder. “Why’re you getting down now, uh?” she inquiries, her body so over his seat he can practically count how many tears her eye with conjunctivitis is tearing, and the view of red, swollen capillaries and twitches awakens a breakfast he’s not even had. “Kudou-kun can take you to your front door so you don’t make a shame out of yourself again.”

“ _Thanks_ , Aoko, you’re so adorable,” he tries to say it the most bitterly way possible without crying at the thought that, _yes, she’s indeed adorable and very adorably sent you to the friendzone years ago and now has found her stupidly adorable girlfriend. Everything adorable around here but you._

She grins at him, showing him how even after the brackets she had to wear for four years one of her front teeth is still standing a bit out, and some macoshits part of him wonders whether Mouri-chan knows about it. Then he decides he doesn’t want to think about the distance they’d to be from each other for her to notice, and instead he covers Aoko’s blinding-white smile with his hand and pushes her back while reaching for the handle with the other.

“But as adorable as you’re, I’d rather walk peacefully to my house with no bug bothering me.” She frowns, her very unhealthy eye almost completely closing. Kaito’s immensely happy to say the least to be out of the car when he smirks at her, casually leaned against the car door. “And believe me, you’ve the size and _are_ as bothering as one, Ahoko.”

By the time Kudou’s car shakes with a strenuous, “BAKAITOOOOOOO!”, from the inside, Kaito has already taken off so rapidly he’s unceremoniously remembered why he’d been late for classes today. When he comes to a stop to rub his lower back and momentarily turns around, he’s out of Aoko’s only functional eye range of view and catches the slightest glimpse of Kudou’s eyes fixedly staring at him through the car’s glass. He can practically hear the guy whispering to his hear a, “You’re not going to get out of this. We’re so going to talk” (and as much as his hormoned, perverted chibi-self would like actually having him doing so, he can also practically feel the handcuffs’ material around his wrists, so no, thank you very much).

A shiver runs down Kaito’s spinal cord and unwelcomingly suits itself on all Kaito’s proof of his manhood, and after slapping himself out of his own fantasy very Kudou-ly full, he comes to two decisions.

1\. He has to stop daydreaming about that night and stick himself more around _night_ -dreaming, because decent people don’t walk around with suspicious bulges on their pants due to gazes. That’s just impolite and gross.

2\. He’d better prepare a good excuse for Aoko, because he’s so avoiding Kudou Shinichi from now on.

* * *

He somehow ends up ignoring Aoko’s twenty-four calls and shooting her a brief text after taking a long, hot shower.

He’s sure Aoko doesn’t believe in the slightest that his neighbor had lost his dog and he’s helping him look for it, first because Kudou is literally a detective and Kaito vehemently denies his help when Aoko asks him if he’d like him to give them a hand, and _who wouldn’t want to team up with a skilled, worldwide famous detective_ — and second because later does Kaito realize that, a) his left-door is actually a woman and she owns a cat, not a dog, and b) the right-door ones are literally Aoko and her dad.

That’s when he decides he’s avoiding Aoko for the next week or so too.

* * *

Kaito’s doing great avoiding Kudou. And by ‘great’, he means ‘Person A aggressively spills very hot, very scalding coffee on their groin so they won’t have to face Person B, but then turns out Person B magically pops up out of nowhere during their next lecture and Person A very unmanly squeaks and takes off after the professor had already called their name and Person B ends up with a very high-quality view of Person A’s wet ass because Person A had been cleaning the coffee off their pants’. Some part of him is suggesting changing the strategy, because he’s starting to suspect his balls would no longer be able to put up with such amount of heat three times a day.

But, all in all, he’s avoiding Kudou.

Unfortunately, somewhere in the process, he’d accidentally isolated himself. Because Aoko’s perfect girlfriend is essentially the childhood, inseparable best friend of the guy he’s trying to avoid, which is problematic on so many levels because, a) he can’t exactly tell Aoko of his, mmh, _misadventure_ with her significant other’s best friend, i.e that he took advantage of him while drunk and knocked him out after robbing his fridge, and b) he’s around 68% sure Kudou knew about his alter ego, and that was _dangerous_.

So, Kaito started avoiding Aoko’s girlfriend, too — and, by extension, Aoko.

Which, not that hard at the beginning, to be honest. Aoko had been so mad at him for having stood them up that she had been the one ignoring _him_ and glaring daggers at him whenever their gazes locked in the cafeteria. This dragged on for four days, and Kaito had been perfectly fine with that — at least until Aoko stormed into his third lecture on Friday and demanded, “WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE, _BAKAITO_?! Stop ignoring me — _I_ am ignoring _you_!” He had had to drag her out of the class because _there’s no way I’m going before you stop this stupid act of yours and promise her he’d be joining them by lunch time_.

It had been cool, at first — he just had to empty his wallet and sell a kidney to buy Aoko an apologize breakfast. But then, Mouri-chan had showed up with Kudou at her side, and Kudou had given him a _look_ while slowly sitting in front of him (Kaito later patted himself on the back for not breaking both poker face and eye contact and not squirming in his chair), and he kind of freaked out and put out the _let’s-kill-Kaito’s-descendants_ show.

(Aoko hadn’t been mad at him this time. She’d somehow understood that burning coffee on crotches was serious stuff.)

And that’s how avoiding Kudou became a triple task of avoiding Aoko, Mouri-chan and Kudou, and Kaito spent the entire week with the _Mission Impossible_ theme song stuck in his head.

Kudou isn’t helping, either. The detective has, multiple times even, tried to talk to him — and Kaito neither knows why nor is he interested, because if it isn’t for something like, “See you in court” or, “My lawyer asked me to hand you a copy of the complaint for sexual harassment, burglary and assault”, Kaito can’t imagine what Kudou would want him for.

The bright side of this clusterfuck is that he has extra time to plan his next heist. Which he definitely needs — he has to come up with a plan H, in case Meitantei manages to blindside him. (His last option is jumping out of a window, and he’s pretty sure Kudou can’t follow him that way. Probably.)

He’s remembered, however, that he’s having a little hard time trying to finish the designs of the disguise as another ‘clink’ bores into his eardrums.

Tightening his grip on the pencil, Kaito looks up from his portfolio and meets the disgusting view of one disgusting Hakuba Saguru disgustingly sipping his disgusting, British tea, and it’s so damn disgusting and British he feels the urge of shoving some decent drink down that disgusting, British throat of his.

“Do you mind?” he says instead, because his criminal record is currently long enough and he has no desire of spending the rest of his life in prison due to annoying Britishes with tea kinks. “This is a library and I’m trying to study.”

Hakuba stops his sipping sound and slightly lowers the mug, brown eyes narrowly staring at Kaito through a fan of eyelashes Kaito can classify only as extremely and disgustingly long and — Jesus Christ, Kaito frowns. He has to use mascara if he wants them that long.

“No, you’re not. You’re drawing half-naked, shameless women in unfashionable excuses of dresses,” he matter-of-factly points out. The mug makes a high-pitched sound at being placed on its plate, and Kaito feels like asking _whom_ the fuck has asked him his Goddamn unwanted opinion. But he doesn’t — because he’s still a polite gentleman.

“Excuse you, blond dickhead.” Kaito points at him with his pencil, “I’m not taking fashion advices from someone with such questionable fashion sense.”

Hakuba shrugs and leans in, distractedly shaking the tea with a spoon and _what the hell is he shaking? It’s tea alone, there is nothing to mix there!_ “Fine,” he annoyingly says, because anything coming from Hakuba’s mouth is annoying. “I’m not giving someone with an obvious lack of fashion sense fashion advices.”

And then, after thirty seconds of Kaito aggressively sketching under the scrutinizing gaze of the blond and Kaito’s hard task of swallowing the sharp, “What?” that leaves him with a bitter taste on the mouth, Hakuba adds, “Are these the disguises you’re planning for the heist?”

Kaito leans over and rapidly collects all the papers to hide the them from view, arms crossed and his body halfly over the table. He’s also pretty sure he’s making the same face Aoko made on elemental school when he tried to copy her homework because he’d been too lazy to do them the afternoon before. “Fuck off, Hakuba.”

The detective lifts his head to stare at him, the clinking sound of the spoon against the cup making Kaito’s teeth grit. “I’m in charge of looking after the library for today,” he sighs, leaning back on his chair, and Kaito wonders whether Kudou’s detective skills are good enough to find Hakuba’s corpse were he hypothetically to hide it.

He spits a, “What the fuck do I care?,” and ignores the, “You _asked_!” before getting back to work, still leaning over the paper to block the view (and giving himself a backache). Hakuba doesn’t deserve to see the dress, anyway; it’s glowingly awesome and Kaito is so proud of his job he’d kiss the sketch if brown eyes weren’t watching him.

Hakuba drowns on his disgusting, British tea again, vaguely staring at Kaito’s hand as it comes and goes over the paper. Blond eyebrows slightly twitch, seemingly struggling with a frown, and Kaito can practically hear him commenting on ‘the lacking in cloth piece of garment he likes to call dress’ again.

“By the way,” Hakuba begins out of nowhere, disgustingly licking his lips, and Kaito finds himself grimacing at the view. _Gross_. “Kaitou KID sent a heist note this morning.”

Kaito hums absentmindedly, internally smirking so wide he’s sure his inner face is hurting. “Is that so?”

“Apparently, he was pretty inspired this time,” Hakuba adds, and Kaito is approximately one hundred one percent sure if he knew just how much that little information feeds his ego, he wouldn’t be telling him that.

“You’re telling me you couldn’t crack it?” Kaito scoffs, fighting his entire self to not rub in his face the fact that he came up with the riddle in seven minutes tops, between two episodes of _Fullmetal Alchemist_.

Hakuba’s left eye twitches, an incredibly pleasant sight. “You wouldn’t happen to know something, would you, _Kuroba-kun_?” Kaito doesn’t miss the emphasis on his name marked with a disgustingly English-accented Japanese, which curiously suited the English teacher Kaito had on elementary school but is acutely gruesome on Hakuba’s mouth.

He takes a precious time stopping the pencil before lifting his gaze, all slow and desirable because he manly acknowledges he loves attention and has this little Tinkerbell complex. ”How would I? You’re the detective, aren’t you, _Haku-chan_?”

Kaito finds it incredibly difficult not to giggle as Hakuba’s nose wings dilate with a very, very, _very_ deep intake at the nickname. In some part of his brain, Kaito puts down a quick note of doing that more often, even if he’ll have to wash his mouth with bleach later — because, you know, _Haku-chan_. Sounds as disgusting as it feels.

Slowly releasing his breath, Hakuba brings the cup back to his lips. “Just thought you might provide some hints,” he says over the edge of the mug, and it’s an unsurprisingly hard task for Kaito not to whine at the obvious and predictable path this conversation is heading, “given that you wrote it.”

Kaito uses all the power of his poker face to suppress the deep-hearted groan that wants to really badly leave his throat and replaces it with a perfectly masked, visibly unaffected sigh. “Why on Earth would _the_ Kaitou KID ask _me_ , of all people, to write his heist notes? You’re giving my IQ of 400 way too much credit, Haku-chan!”

“Is that the best way you have to rub on other people’s faces the fact you’ve a high IQ?” And Kaito just shrugs because it’s not his fault he has a high IQ and Hakuba doesn’t, and he’s not rubbing it on other people’s faces; he’s rubbing it on _Hakuba’s_ face. Way more socially acceptable.

Hakuba sighs and does something very weird and very complicated with his eyes that involves lots of eyelids fluttering and something between closing and rolling them, and Kaito tries to move on from the thought of sticking out his tongue just for the pleasure of seeing him doing that again.

Then, Kaito discovers that he should definitely have stuck his tongue out, because maybe that way he’d have been able to prevent Hauba from sticking his nose where it doesn’t fucking belong. “Is that why you’ve been avoiding Nakamori-san?” he asks, all absentmindedly and uninterestedly and _why do you have to ask if you don’t give a fuck? That’s impolite and ungentlemanly and pretty sure fucking breaks lots of absurd British laws!_

Kaito has to remind himself he kind of came to mildly good terms with the guy a while ago and settled somewhere where the ‘British and disgusting’ stuff was allowed but dying his hair was not. “Hypothetically,” he begins, matter-of factly. “If I were the Kaitou KID — which I’m not — and had a best friend whom I so heartedly love — and I’m not saying KID has one or that he loves them — I’d _never_ ignore her in favor of writing an hypothetical, stupid and meaningless heist note — which I’ve so not written, obviously.”

“I’m not in a good mood for this level of foolishness, Kuroba,” Hakuba retorts, making something amazing between rolling his eyes while frowning. And then, pointedly ignoring Kaito’s, “You _have_ a good mood state?” excessively skeptical comment, he adds, “She’s worried, you know. She’s afraid you’re developing some kind of best friend jealousy and isolating yourself because you can’t put up with seeing her with Mouri-san.”

That’s oddly accurate, Kaito bitterly notices. Just that his ‘best friend’ jealousy isn’t best-friendly at all and he’s not intentionally isolating himself. _Your life is like a romantic comedy, Kaito. Minus the romance and only you laughing at your own jokes._

Refraining himself from commenting, “It’s not like I don’t have any more friends” — because, sadly, he doesn’t — he decides for something that doesn’t send his self-esteem underground. “I’m not avoiding her and I’m not jealous. Why would I? I’m _happy_ she’s found someone to love and that equally loves her.” And he’s not lying. Just that he’d be a lot happier if he were _that_ person.

“I had thought this went without saying but she does love you too,” Hakuba states, matter-of-factly, and Kaito comes back to his sketch because he doesn’t wants or needs the pitiful ‘ _I-know-but-won’t-mention-it_ ’ look right now. “She really worries about you, Kuroba. You shouldn’t ignore her just for your issues.”

Kaito doesn’t respond to that, and he’s silently glad Hakuba doesn’t try to delve into the subject.

His hands are vaguely moving over the paper when the bell announces the period has finished and Hakuba collects his things and leaves without even saying goodbye. Not that Kaito cares. He’s skipping the next lecture, anyway (it’s been labelled as ‘Kudou Invaded’).

After thirty minutes, eighty growls and at least three warnings from the old lady who’s looking after the library now, Kaito bitterly and reluctantly decides that Hakuba is most likely right for once in his life and that he’ll talk to Aoko in a couple of days, when the heist pressure is over. _Alright, Kaito_ , he thinks, proudly holding the pencil up, _You can do this. You're a fully twenty-one grown-up man. You can avoid your more-than-ten-years long love interest for the next couple of days_. And then, that voice inside him that seems pretty attached to mocking him adds, _Even the days have couples and you don't. Your life is so sad, Kaito._

Groaning, Kaito drops the pencil on the table and aggressively closes his portfolio. He considers it for half a second before deciding _fuck it_ and starts gathering his items and shoving them into his briefcase with the clear picture in his mind of one of those cakes from the cafeteria. Aoko has classes now, anyway, and given that the sole reason he’s skipping his lecture is because Kudou’s attending it, there’s no way he’d run into either of them.

Bag over one shoulder and ignoring the old woman’s dark glare for having dragged the chair, he exits the library. He isn’t in the mood to design anymore.

* * *

The night hadn’t gone exactly as he’d expected, and by the time he’s unceremoniously shoving his bright pink stilettos into one of the many bags one of the maintenance service guys — codename: Jii-chan — will be carrying out of the Suzuki Great Hotel later that night, Kaito has to admit that, a) he’s, to say the least, unamused — Kudou showing up at his heist had been, while not unexpected, unrequited (Kaito wanted to show his last piece of perfection around, maybe anonymously rub it on Hakuba’s face and — why not — let the rest of mundanes admire his recently shaved legs — because, you know, Tinkerbell complex; he needs attention), and b) Suzuki Jirokichi has a quite interesting amount of useless, impenetrable, empty rooms for no other reason than exposing jewels — which speaks for the man’s ego itself, in Kaito’s opinion.

Not that he’s going to complain. Those rooms are thrilling challenges for him.

He’s back in white uniform now, whistling the _Mission Impossible_ theme song while spinning around his finger a keyring that secretly holds Suzuki Jirokichi’s fingerprints and heading to the room where the jewel is being displayed.

He’s already lead Nakamori-keibu and his minions out of the building (he just had to release a few feathers through the only tiny air conduct present in the room, all the while lowering mirrors the same shape as the jewel glass case, hidden in the roof beforehand, to create the illusion that the jewel was gone. Then, a little acting, a fake jewel — that indeed contains chocolate because he’s hungry — and a dummy, and it was game over for the police), and Hakuba must be sulking on his couch by now, trying to get the disgusting smell of British tea off his clothes. Ha.

To be completely honest, Kaito has no idea where Kudou is — the guy just disappeared after receiving a phone call — but since the hotel is mostly empty and he doesn’t have handcuffs on by now, Kaito can’t bring himself to give a single underwater fuck. He’s just going to get the jewel and take his leave. Through the front door — just in case Kudou’s waiting for him on the rooftop.

Kaito enters the super impenetrable, super inviolable room password — 1582-9 (seriously, he still can’t believe the best password that old man could come up with was a mix of his and his dog’s birthdates) — and patiently waits until the door completely slides open by its own. The room is still as grey as it had been this afternoon when he checked it out to make sure everything was ready for his show, an unfashionable shade of grey that doesn’t match with his suit and he’s almost ashamed the cameras are going to record this.

It takes him less than five minutes to remove the mirrors from the glass case and — TACHAN! — the jewel is inside, a mostly transparent, unnecessarily huge diamond with an eccentric shape. It’s so Suzuki-like that Kaito’s eye twitches when that voice in his head annoyingly comments that there’s no way such a noticeable jewel is Pandora — since the ‘secret’ in secret magic jewel is intended to remain, you know, _secret_ — and Kaito prefers not to inquire into the fact that the voice sounds pretty much like Hakuba.

Eight screws, two laser deactivations and another birthdate identification code later, Kaito pockets the jewel, sighing and huffing his cheeks like the five years old he is. “I shouldn’t have sent Hakuba home yet. At least I’d have fun leading him around or embarrassing him with my fake breasts.”

“He’ll never learn, right?”

There’s a loud _crack_ from his neck rapidly turning around, and Kaito’s so glad he can maintain his poker face even when he’s sure he’s minimally dislocated some bones and that he can restrain himself from squeaking or whimpering or making any other unmanly sound that could embarrass himself, that the fact that Kudou’s in a corner of the room looking suspiciously evil only shakes him like a earthquake of 8.5. Which is pretty low considering that _Kudou’s in the room and I’m in the room and we two are alone in a locked room and this isn’t funny at all._

Though Kaito has to give the guy some credit, to be honest. He’s sitting in a chair — a red velvet, spinning chair (which Kaito isn’t sure makes him look like a villain or a gamer) — in the furthest, darkest spot, right beside the door, petting a witchy black cat that looked straight out of Akako’s pet shop or something, and staring at Kaito with only one eye, because the other one is covered both by his bangs and the darkness. Kaito’s about to suggest him a haircut before he decides that’s probably not the kind of conversation he wants to have with a detective who’s locked with him — presumably wanted phantom thief — and most likely could arrest him. So, yeah, Kaito ain’t suggesting him shit. Maybe if Kudou can see only through one eye he’ll crash into a wall or something and lose the memories of this last week. Best plan ever.

“Meitantei.”

“KID.”

_Donkey_ , Kaito ironically thinks, because apparently handsomeness and communication skills don’t come together on the Making Gods Pack and that’s why Kudou lacks the knowledge to notice Kaito’s aiming for an explanation, not a greeting. _Wow. The power of conversation._

“Such a pleasure meeting you here,” Kaito casually comments, slightly moving to his left to put between him and Kudou a minimum of ten metres. “I thought you had retired for the night.”

Kudou puts on a smile that Kaito can only describe as evilly knowing and, okay, maybe he was starting to internally freak out a bit. “Sure. A _pleasure_.” Oh, Kudou emphasizing words. Kaito wants to whine because _why does it have to sound so disgusting on Hakuba’s mouth but so stupidly sexy on Kudou’s?!_ “I wanted to talk to you.”

_Play it cool, Kaito. Become — become a freezer. Okay, a freezer is indeed icy, not cool — and you’re mentally rambling and that’s way more embarrassing than doing it out loud because you surely look like a lunatic, fixedly staring at the guy with a blank face. Ugh._

“Why are you silently sitting on a the dark while petting a black cat like some Star War’s villain?”

Kudou doesn’t move, though Kaito can see his fingers lazily caressing the cat’s back tightening around the animal’s fur, and when one of those amber eyes cracks open, he perfectly knows Kudou’s hand is another unfair play away from being hardly bitten. “To be completely honest,” Kudou starts, somehow hesitant, “the first couple of people who I did that to weren’t you — and, uh, I wanted to make sure it was you and… stuff.”

Kaito needs a couple of well hidden blinks to realize that, a) Kudou has leant further into the chair’s back with a hand over his face, b) that’s due to actual embarrassment, and c) ‘and stuff’ involves — that involves a lot of things. Like — like what?

Mentally shaking his head, Kaito tries to focus on something else that doesn’t involve Kudou’s stuff. “That doesn’t explain about the cat.”

“Uh.” Kaito can see how Kudou’s terribly azure eye drops to his lap, clearly moving on the dark, and it’s not even a surprise he feels the need to internally cry because _why does he have to have those eyes? Why couldn’t they be — I don’t know — a disgusting shade of brown like Hakuba’s? Why can’t he be as disgusting as Hakuba? Why does he have to be so stupidly handsome? That’s not fair!_ “Suzuki Jirokichi’s new pet. I think I stole its chair or something like that and it kind of followed me here.”

Oh. So Kudou is petting the cat just because he’s a kind-hearted detective that worries about animals’ well-being even when catching filthy, tricky thieves. Of course. It’s Kudou we’re talking about, and Kudou is polite and a good person and _probably completely innocent until you corrupted him the other night, Kaito. You’re so going to Hell. Hope they have free Wi-Fi for you._

Kaito clears his throat, a vague excuse to keep himself from whimpering out of self-pity because now is so not the time, and absentmindedly waves his hand. “Yeah, uh — I’ll leave you with your new friend, then.” Discreetly putting out the keyring with Jirokichi’s fingerprints, he slowly but steadily approaches the door, transmitting all the confidence his actually unconvinced self can transmit. “And I’m taking my leaving now, so see — eh?”

Oh, what a surprise. An unexpected turn of events. And by ‘unexpected’, he clearly means _completely expected._

By the third time he tries the fingerprints on the small tactile screen and very red, bold, attention-attracting letters spelling 'INCORRECT' pop up, Kaito is eighty percent positively freaking out. All silent and unnoticeable — but his inner chibi is already setting his brain on fire and evacuating whatever is the little staff they have. Because he’s locked up, suit on, in a room with a detective — detective with whom he had his wicked way less than two weeks before, and the idea of being in the same room like him again awakes this inner fear of Kudou connecting dots and finally figuring out his true identity, because this is Kudou and the guy is unreasonably good at connecting unrelated things.

Not that he’s going to admit being related to KID, or KID’s going to admit knowing Kuroba Kaito — but still.

“Calm down, will you?” Kudou’s calm voice speaks from behind him, and the next thing he hears is a loud meow and a snort and a huffled, high-pitched squeak that must have been Kudou’s reaction at the cat’s crawls on his skin. Kaito is adult enough to admit he’s making satisfactory faces at the guy’s suffering. “We’re not trapped here. I may or may not, and only temporally, have changed the password settings — and before you go all crazy and knock me out with one of those smoke bombs of yours, I just want to talk.”

Reluctantly, Kaito puts the smoke bombs he’s already taken out back into his inner pocket. Damn Kudou and his seer skills. “Talk about what?”

“Oh, come on!” Kudou stands up (the cat had gotten down before, Kaito notices. He also takes in the red lines on Kudou’s hands before he shoves them into his pockets). “You know what we have to talk about, _Kaito_.”

Oh, great. Well, _shit_.

Kaito is fully panicking now. Not that he can’t play it cool and perform the best acting ever — but, again, this is Kudou, and Kudou is stubborn and adamant and good-looking, and Kaito can’t even escape and come back two or three weeks later all, “Kaito? I’ve no idea what you’re talking about, Meitantei. Too much coffee for you, my dear.”

He’ll have to play it less cool than usually. “Okay, stop right there, Meitantei. You must be having hallucinations or something, because you’re talking nonsense around there. Are you claustrophobic? Maybe you should open the door so we all can have fresh—”

“Shut up,” Kudou demands, his hand suddenly over Kaito’s mouth, and the poor thief only wants to gasp because this is way too much contact and he’s not ready for this, not yet. He’s had that hand in other indecent places. “You’re giving me a headache.”

Kaito frowns and grabs Kudou’s wrist, all outraged because he’s a diva and no one shuts him up. “Fine.” He turns around, pointedly straightening his hat. “I’ll go sit in a corner until something falls from the roof and beats some sense into—WAH!”

A squeak, arms up and the next thing Kaito knows is that his face is flushed with the floor — which, by the way, needs some good clean-up — and he can feel Kudou’s smug gaze on his nape, and he _swears_ doesn’t even need to turn around to know Kudou is fucking _smirking_. He does, though, and isn’t even surprised when the first thing he sees is Kudou’s foot on his cape. Of fucking course.

What he definitely doesn’t expect is the guy to bend down over him, grab both his wrists with — and Kaito’s professional enough to admit it — enviable speed and pin his hands at both sides of his head. He’s barely got over his shock by the time Kudou’s sitting on his thighs, legs at each sides of his so he can kick to break free. Truly a smart choice, Kaito recognizes — although it doesn’t prevent him from madly flushing because, uh, the guy is sitting on his _lap_. Really, really close to Kaito’s crotch.

“Can you stop?” Kudou speaks over him, and Kaito can’t bring himself to respond this time because he’s still trying to move on from ‘Kudou’ and ‘sitting on his lap’. A hard task. “I turned the cameras off, no one is coming here unless I call them _and_ I’m not going to turn you in. I just want to talk. Please, Kuroba.”

Kaito’s pretty sure he’s pouting by now — because it’s not fair looking so beautiful and ravishing and desirable just pronouncing a name, okay? — and he really is in no position to argue, is he? “How did you find out?”

Kudou blinks, all eyelashes and sparkling blue eyes. “Are you kidding me?” But Kaito’s face must clearly show he’s not, because Kudou nods at something behind his head. “First of all, the top hat fell off. And you don’t really believe a monocle to be enough disguise, do you?” Kaito swallows the bitter, “And glasses are?” that wants to leave his mouth and opts to give Kudou an unamused look that clearly means for him to continue with something more detective-like. Kudou sighs. “Eyes. You know, your disguise is not precisely made for fooling children, and I’ve been looking at KID from down there for three years. Call me cheesy, but the only thing I could clearly made out of your face was your eyes.”

Ten full seconds of silence later, Kaito can only come out with a, “Are you  _serious_?! You connected dots because of _my eyes_?!”

“Yeah, eh… Something like that.” Kudou seems to be aware of the noticeable pink that’s rising from his chest and slowly extending to his collarbone, neck and cheeks, because he gulps and licks his lips — and oh my God, the room temperature has just increased a few degrees, hasn’t it? “And, uh — you were dressed as a woman today and, eh, I kind of still remember your legs?” By the end of the sentence, Kudou’s pitch is at least three octaves higher, and Kaito needs a moment to breathe. Breathe something that’s not Kudou’s pine needles essence, please. “Also, I kept looking at you to see if you noticed I’d figured you out in your disguise, but you were both pointedly avoiding me and too busy spilling british tea on Hakuba.”

“You figured me out because of my legs and because I didn’t put a prank on you?” Kaito asks with disbelief.

“... Yes?”

Oh — okay. That’s — information. That’s information. New information. Kaito barely refrains himself from moving his legs uncomfortably.

“Okay, whatever. What do you want to talk about? Listen, if you’re gonna report me because I assaulted your fridge and knocked you out with sleeping gas, I’ll have you know I didn’t know the smoke bomb actually contained sleeping gas so that must count as—”

“Kuroba,” Kudou interrupts again, and even though it kind of pisses Kaito off because _no one interrupts me_ , it also sends a spark down his spinal cord that feels incredibly amazing. “Shush. I’m not going to report you — who even said anything about reporting? I just want to talk about _that night_.”

Oh.

_Oh_.

So, he’s getting a sexual harassment warrant, after all. Fantastic. And Aoko won’t even visit him in prison because he’s been smart enough to sexually harass her girlfriend’s best friend.

“Yeah, uh, you see…” Kaito awkwardly laughs which sounds less like laughter and more like a mouse squeaking. “I’m sorry about that night. I know I kind of took advantage of you while drunk, and you probably didn’t want to—”

“ _What_?” Kudou squeaks, and Kaito must admit he’s pretty happy he isn’t the only one unmanly squeaking here. He clears his throat, tries again. “You did _what_?”

“Took… advantage of you?” He didn’t intend for it to come out as a question, but it does anyway. “You know, when you lead someone who isn’t totally conscious of his choices to do something they don’t want to do?”

“I know that — I know what taking advantage means — which I don’t get is why you think you took advantage of me.” Then Kudou frowns, a quick spark of recognition lighting his eyes up. “You… remember what happened?”

Kaito can’t really bring himself to say, “Yeah, your dick has pretty much been a constant image on my mind in the last, let’s say, ten days”, so he simply nods and makes an awkward noise that’s intended to be a, “Yeah.”

“I don’t remember how we got to your house, though,” he admits later. “I mean, I _know_ we had to talk, but I don’t really remember anything except — y-you know.” He’s stuttering? _Oh, Kaito, you are. You’re stuttering. You’re so screwed._

Kudou nods, face extremely serious for someone who’s blushing a dark shade of red and repeatedly chewing on his bottom lip, and Kaito wonders if this is some kind of punishment for whatever he did or said that he doesn’t remember. Because this feels like punishment. And Kudou is still sitting on his lap.

“You didn’t take advantage of me,” he finally says, releasing the red, swollen, wet piece of flesh that Kaito wants to bite too. “I mean, we both were drunk, and I kind of _actively_ participated on our activities, and it was actually my idea to bring you home with the clear intention of having sex, so, eh — yeah, you didn’t. Take advantage of me, I mean.”

_Oh God. Oh my God, oh my God, oh. My. God._ Kaito’s positively wearing a bright shade of red himself, and between all this embarrassment he can only be glad that his current color matches his necktie.

Right. So he hadn’t lured the guy into lusty activities. Which means no sexual harassment warrant. Which means no jail. Which means actually facing Aoko tomorrow. Aoko and her girlfriend. Aoko _with_ her unfairly stunning girlfriend.

Okay, he’s changed his mind. He wants to go to jail, thank you very much.

“What I mean is,” Kudou continues, and now that Kaito looks at him he can notice that the guy has managed to come back to his usual relaxed, cool, handsome self. Ugh. “I want to stop this stupid game of cat and mouse between us, Kuroba. Nakamori-san is worried about you — something about you isolating yourself because of some best-friend jealousy, I didn’t quite understand, to be honest. And Ran is worried too — mostly because Nakamori-san is worried, but still. I don’t want to see Ran worried, and I suspect the same for you. We had sex — we’re mature enough to maintain a perfectly normal friendship from now on.”

_Speak for yourself,_ Kaito thinks, outraged, because he’s still a twelve years old child that likes to draw dicks on asleep people’s faces and giggles when they wake up and he’s perfectly okay with that.

“Yeah, of course.” Such a liar he is. “We can be friends.” Hesitantly, Kaito lifts his head and looks down, awkwardly nodding to his lower half. “Would you — eh, can you get off now? This is not precisely a, uh, _friends_ situation.”

They spend the next two hours with Kudou apologizing and with the two of them proving which fingerprints Kudou used to lock the door (which is basically one hour and forty-five minutes of Kudou apologizing and fifteen minutes for the rest).

By the end of the night and with an actual proof that Kudou isn’t going to turn him in, Kaito comes to the conclusion that maybe — and just maybe — the guy isn’t as bad as he had initially thought. Sure, he’s still a detective and a Holmes freak and is one British tea and an OCD away from being a Hakuba 2.0., and Kaito still finds it weird being near the guy when he’s one hundred percent sure he’s going to be the main character of his wet dreams tonight — but unlike other british, disgusting detectives, he’s not a dick about KID, and he’s good-looking.

So, all in all, Kaito counts tonight as a success. Even if the jewel isn’t Pandora and he still wakes up the next morning with the need of the coldest shower ever.

* * *

Kaito finds himself plopping himself on one of the chairs of the University library and discreetly spying the blond figure calmly reading one of those Holmes books beside him. He knows Hakuba has noticed him popping up out of nowhere and unceremoniously inviting himself to his reading session, and Kaito wonders, for as long as the silence lasts, if he can just simply say, “Oh, my bad, I thought it was someone interesting” and just disappear.

The detective doesn’t give him the opportunity. “You not speaking for more than five seconds is serious stuff, Kuroba.” Hakuba sighs and very, very slowly closes his book, probably just to see how much Kaito’s eye can twitch before him ripping it out. “What do you want?”

“This is a public place,” Kaito defensively retorts, and then growls because, as much as Hakuba enerves him, he’s not here to argue. So, as bitterly as his tongue is able to formule words, he spits a quick, low, “Thank you.”

Hakuba’s eyelined eyes go from ‘oh, Kuroba’ to ‘oh, Kuroba _thanking_ ’ wide in a matter of three seconds. “I beg your pardon?”

“ _Thank you_ — I said thank you, okay?” Kaito huffs and crosses his arms, the perfect pose for someone who is not thanking. “Thanks for… talking Aoko and stuff. Turned out she was really worried _and_ had been planning to break into my house yesterday night. But she told me earlier you told her to wait until today before turning on her panic mode, so — yeah, thank you. For calming her down.”

The blond hums, probably because he’s thinking how relatable that is to a confession and is internally celebrating with a tea party. Ugh. “You’re welcome.”

After ten awkward, uncomfortable seconds of silence, Kaito clears his throat and stands up mumbling a, “Yeah, uh, I’m going now.”

He’s not even midway the door when Hakuba speaks again, “Kuroba. You and Kudou-kun—”

And Kaito kind of internally freaks out, a not-so-internal blush rising from his chest to his cheeks, and it takes all the power of his poker face not to squeak when he interrupts Hakuba. “We’re friends!” And then he storms out, leaving a startled, blonde detective behind who keeps staring at the door for two long minutes after Kaito disappears.

“I… was just going to say you two really take after each other.”


	3. The case of the male maid and the missed V card | Part I

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ###  **Things you probably didn't notice in the previous chapter:**
>
>> • Initially, Scene 2 was intended to be Scene 1 before I was possessed and decided to delete the whole chapter. That's why there's a plot hole the size of a trunk. Believe me when I say the draft was _a lot_ worse, even if it seems impossible.
>
>> • I spent fifteen minutes staring at the document with the 'WHORE' thing. I wanted it to actually spell 'BROTHEL', but couldn't come up with anything. Still think it doesn't make sense xd
>
>> • The title, "'Polite' is the new 'British and disgusting'" is a joke between helloimtrash and me. I used 'polite' on the Scene 1 so much that she asked me if the 'British and disgusting' from Scene 2 was some kind of reference. It wasn't since Scene 2 was previously written — but I still find it incredibly funny.
>
>> • There were so many plot holes in the draft that I could jump from one to another.
>
>> • The 'couple of days' joke was written when I posted the first chapter. I suddenly remembered it existed and forcefully added it.
>
>> • The 'Step right this way, watch carefully' quote when Shinichi looks super sure where he's going and Kaito panics is a reference to Magic Kaito 1412. It's exactly what Kaito says at the end of each chapter. Nobody got it.
> 
> * * *
> 
> **I'M ALIVE!**
> 
> I bet you all thought I had died. It's okay, at some point I thought so too :'v
> 
> So, after two long, insufferable months, _at last_ the so waited chapter 3 is here! \\._./ This poor, little, _12174 words long_ baby had so many problems. Initially, this chapter was meant to contain both Chapter 3 and Chapter 4, but HIM (we all know who and I'm too lazy to tag her — but _she_ ) told me at some point in scene two while I was suffering, "Yeah, but at least you're almost done", and then I went like, "Uh, this is barely the beginning". So, yeah, I had to split this in Chapter 3 and Chapter 4, and consequently add extra scenes that weren't originally planned. (Which is why I'm going to take other 2 months writing and suffering with Chapter 4 because I don't even know how to start it. Literally. I only have the idea for the last scene. So suit yourself and enjoy this 12k words, cuz this will be all you're going to get in a long, long, _long_ time xd)
> 
> In a more personal way, I started University, yay! :D Well, not yay for you, because that means I'll have less time to write xd But it's okay, it's really cool, I'm having a great time (most of the time) and I practically moved to the Culture Room (which also guilty for stealing my writing time xd). Also I have friends that help me giving me ideas and stuff, probably the only reason I have a draft with some dialogues(??? They're lovely xd
> 
> I've been developing other ideas too. I have a note on my phone with, like, seven titles and summaries for one-shots. Also I'm doing a collaboration (which I have **not** started. Eek), so, I'm sorry, but I'll be focusing less on this. That doesn't mean I'm going to abandon it! My weekend has 3 days now, and Friday/Saturday/Sunday, depending on the week, is entirely dedicated to writing. I promise I'll try to write About Last Night as fast as possible, though as I said, I'll take my time.
> 
> What else...
> 
> I'm running out of characters, so xd I hope you all enjoy the reading and, beforehand, sorry for any spelling/grammar mistakes you may find. Truth is I've read this so many times I'm _sick_ xd Oh, also sorry because I have no sexual sense and I need someone to teach me how sexual tension works. I'll do my research for next times :'v
> 
> That being said,
> 
> ### Enjoy~!

As a bookworm and an asocial child who has always been surrounded by girls, changed schools between America and Japan so often he still has the dual citizen certification lost somewhere in God knows which drawer, spent all his summers until he was thirteen practically from plane to plane and then lived on its own since his parents abandoned him, Shinichi knows very little about clubs — if not nothing. He’s never been interested in those kind of things, to be honest, and the only time he happened to go to one out of self-pity and the beginning of a depression, he’d ended up with the Kaitou KID naked in his bed. So, yeah, he lacks knowledge.

Nevertheless, he’s pretty sure attending one with blood spots on your shirt, the smell of gunpowder in your hair and a possible concussion starting to make you dizzy is definitely not socially acceptable.

He’s tried to tell Hattori so. Many times. He even ended up texting him during the taxi drive, because Hattori had been so busy furiously hitting his phone screen — most likely in the middle of an argument with Kazuha, going by the long paragraphs of texts on his screen and the repetitive usage of angry emojis and exclamation marks — that he hadn’t glanced at him once. Aside from a brief, “I feel ya, Kudou”, Hattori hadn’t replied. And, obviously, that had been by text.

He tried calling him too, and he’s positive the taxi driver had looked at them at least thrice through the rear-view mirror when, at the fourth rejected call, he’d finally snapped and let out, “COULD YOU PICK UP THE DAMN PHONE, HATTORI?” and all he got in response was an idly, “Been there, Kudou, been there.”

So, as his strategy didn’t work, Shinichi currently finds himself in front of two gorilla-like men with ‘ _Security Guard_ ’ plastered on their chest, sunglasses on even though it’s at least midnight and stuffed in second-skin tight black suits (bitterly, he wonders if the constant appearance of people with scary, sadistic faces and in unfashionable dark uniforms is his life’s way of reminding him of his mistakes or something). He’s pretty sure the only reason they allow them to come in is because Hattori is swearing quite loudly in his Kansai-ben while arguing with Kazuha through the phone and a negative would most likely lead him to show off his pretty obvious Kendo skills — since he’s been randomly shaking a sting while yelling.

“Ya know what?!?!” he angrily shouts, earning a few looks from the queue behind them. The stick breaks when Hattori hits the corner again, and Shinichi can’t really do much more than apologetically look at the two gorillas waving at them to come in. They don’t even seem that scary anymore compared to Hattori’s fury. “Imma stay with Kudou tonight. Ya do whatever ya want, _Ahou_!”

Shinichi can’t even find it in himself to whine. He’s tired as fuck, some tiny, evil creature is slamming a hammer against his nape and he had plans for tonight — a book, three mugs of coffee and a really, really long talk with his pillow. Hattori self-inviting himself to his house is almost as pleasant as the poisoned corpse they’ve dealt with for five hours, the psychopath who had thought it was a good idea to try to escape and the bullet wound he had almost received. Seriously, he doesn’t even want to be in a club in the first place.

He follows Hattori through the sea of people though, both because he’s already there anyway and because Hattori has him grabbed by the wrist and is literally dragging him.

The place isn’t Shinichi’s type. Half-naked women in what probably are excuses of maid dresses are carrying trays with strangely fluorescent alcohol beverages on them, he recognizes the foreign song as the one Sonoko blasted on repeat during her twenty-first anniversary party, and Shinichi isn’t sure if he’s going to die for drinking bright orange shots or because the utaite is miles off the key and it’s boring his eardrums.

He’s at his fifth shot and into a deep heart-to-heart, silent conversation with the empty tumbler between his fingers when Hattori slams his shot glass against the counter and grumbles under his breath, “Kazuha would seriously make the worst girlfriend ever,” and Shinichi realizes how hopeless his state is when all that comes to his mind is, _Oh, wow, Hattori must have a pretty loud voice if he’s grumbling and I can still hear him over 115.83 decibels._

“She’s bossy 'nd dramatic 'nd has been ridiculously puttin’ on weight as if kilos were her new panties.” Shinichi blinks at the comparison — he isn’t an expert since his sexual life can literally be summed up with the word ‘dick’, but is kind of sure those two things aren’t remotely related — but then remembers Hattori is a couple of shots ahead of him and decides he can work with half kilos as the new tangas. “Her ass 's currently as big as the sofa cushions, 'nd I’m afraid I’ll end up sleepin’ in the couch at this rate cuz she’ll be takin’ all the bed. She’s so hopeless, Kudou. How’s she gonna even find a boyfriend?”

“You’re literally dating her,” Shinichi points out, matter-of-factly, tactlessly, surely-three-seconds-away-from-a-punch-ly. “And stop fat-shaming, you gained five pounds since last summer and she’s still with you.”

Hattori stares at him, unamused, glaring sharp knives into his skull and outrageously palming his belly, but Shinichi doesn’t hear his offended retort as his gaze gets caught by a waitress with disheveled pigtails and a tray with pink drinks balanced on one hand passing by. Shinichi’s eyes widens.

He’s experienced lots of unexpected, at-first-glance impossible things in his life — from the ‘ _I woke up being a seven years old again after a random guy hit me_ ’ to the ‘ _I woke up with the Kaitou KID naked beside me in my bed after his civil persona hit_ on _me_ ’ spectrum (and he isn’t sure which is worse, to be honest). Somewhere down the line, he had just given up and assumed nothing could possibly surprise him anymore, because that’s what happens when you’ve been jumping from drug to drug for years and almost become a llama three times (worthy risks, according to Haibara). Nevertheless, as his eyes travel from the black, neck-breaking stilettos to the hair tied up with a single hidden ribbon and the bonnet decorating the top of the head, he realizes that seeing Kuroba Kaito in a big-shirt long maid dress is something he wasn’t prepared for.

It’s not like he hasn’t seen him crossdressing before. He has. Many times, in fact. (If Shinichi has to be completely honest, he’s sure the thief has three closets in his room: one for his daily clothes, another for dresses, wigs and mortal stilettos, and another to enter whenever he’s bored and then come out screaming, “Mom, I came out of the closet!”)

But somewhat, as his eyes follow the graceful movements of Kuroba’s shaved legs leaning in and back and sliding between the tables, he realizes the view of Kuroba Kaito stuffed in a tight dress is completely different of the amount of times he’s seen KID showing off.

Kuroba is… a beautiful sight, Shinichi has to admit. If he didn’t know what was under the dress, he’d be completely fooled. The garment seems to perfectly embrace his chest and hips to hide the abs Shinichi knows he has (he may or may not have enjoyed them more than necessary — but that isn’t important right now, is it?) and emphasize the natural curve his waist makes. The skirt is voluptuous enough to cover the upper part of his thighs, the extensions he must be wearing are just the same shade as his hair — or so it seems in all that darkness — and he’s somehow managed to make the collar of the dress make his fake bre—

And Shinichi is stopping there, because Hattori is giving him a weird look and the barman is staring at him rather disapprovingly. He drowns the rest of his drink, almost hoping the orange thing is actually poisonous to hide away his shame — because he’s a man and, dammit, Kuroba is stunning.

He’s not beautiful like Ran. Ran’s beauty is a sigh of the wind, a cool breeze caressing your skin at the seashore. It’s the sand at the sunset warming your feet, the warmth of a lover’s arms embracing you from behind. It’s calming. She’s able to warm up the coldest winter day just with the slightest twitch of her lips and breathe life into hopelessness with a single look. Her beauty is the kind of beauty you can look at for hours without getting tired, the kind of beauty you expect to see an artist picturing millions of times and it’s still innovative.

Kuroba’s beauty isn’t like that. Kuroba is overwhelming and attaching, consciously striking since the first moment he steps foot into a room and proud of that. He’s hot wind hitting you in the middle of the summer, burning sand under your feet that has you tip-toeing and speeding like a crazy person — and it still _hurts_. His beauty captures you and makes you dizzy, clumsy, and then he smiles and sets all your world on fire. He’s breathtaking. He’s wildness and freedom and possibly the only guy in the entire world capable of making pigtails look naturally sexy.

So, yeah, Shinichi’s allowed to think the guy is ravishing, okay?

Now, that put aside, why Kuroba may be working here, he doesn’t know. Maybe taking jobs where he’s allowed to freely crossdress in indecent, socially questionable dresses and testing his balance in stilettos Shinichi has only seen in Sonoko’s wardrobe is his way of killing some time, because he looks suspiciously too comfortable sliding between the tables, tray full of rainbow-colored drinks in one hand while the other is busy gathering up empty glasses and professionally dismissing rather touchy clients. Or maybe he was bored and saw the place and thought, “Hey, why not?” and that’s only KID’s experience showing up. (Knowing KID, it could perfectly be both.)

Shinichi is in the middle of his ‘ _You’re trying to understand KID_ ’ crisis when he realizes that’s, a) not wise, because he’s KID and KID voluntary jumped off a plane about to crash _and that isn’t something your mind is ready to comprehend, Shinichi_ , and b) none of his business, his inner voice scolds him. He winces upon noticing that he, indeed, _is_ sticking his nose where it doesn’t belong again, that he _hasn’t_ learned a single thing in his entire life — because apparently he’s a masochist and enjoys being poisoned to death — and that Kuroba is being harassed.

Oh.

_Wait_.

Shinichi blinks, stopping himself midway from bumping his head against the counter as his brain is already having enough troubles trying to process that a guy with a morally questionable truck driver appearance is holding Kuroba’s wrist and yelling something Shinichi doesn’t quite catch and _what?_

Kuroba gracefully turns on his heels — an apparently impossible task because ten centimetres high stilettos — and shoots the man a look that Shinichi bets was meant to be threatening, but for some reason only makes Kuroba cuter. The man doesn’t buy it either, and under the bored, neutral expression of the male maid, he keeps shouting something Shinichi still doesn’t hear, at which Kuroba only raises his eyebrows.

It isn’t until the music lowers down that he gets to catch a loud, “So, where is it?!”, and out of nowhere Shinichi feels like his soon-to-be mortal concussion has gotten a million times worse and he’s about to faint.

Kuroba doesn’t even blink. “For the seventh time,” he begins, with so much indifference and venom wrapped in a fake, girly voice that Shinichi is surprised it isn’t poisonous, “I’ve no idea what you’re talking about. This is disturbing the rest of the clients and I need to go back to work, so, if you’ll excuse me, sir.” He lightly shakes his arm as if to emphasize his point, but even from Shinichi’s point it’s still obvious he’s about to knock the man out and hide behind the _he-was-pestering-me_ damsel in distress façade.

Apparently, the man must be blind or something, or maybe he has hit his head against a wall and also has a concussion, because he visibly tightens his grip and leans in closer. “I know you got my wallet. Give it back, you little bit—”

He stutters, then makes a choking sound, and Shinichi isn’t even surprised when the next thing he knows is that Kuroba drops on his knees due to the weight of the man’s obviously lifeless body dragging him down.

A high-pitched sound breaks the silence in a matter of ten seconds. Groaning, Shinichi drops his head against the surface of the bar and makes his greatest effort not to bump it while crying, because he has a concussion, Hattori is so wasted he’s carrying an argument with a non-existent Kazuha and behaving like she actually _responds_ , half of the staff is having an hysteria attack and there’s a dead body on the ground still grabbing Kuroba’s wrist — whom, by the way, despite his unnatural shade of white, is rather still and terrifyingly calm for someone who’s being held by a corpse.

Settling for crying his soul out into a pillow once he gets home, Shinichi reaches out for Hattori’s shoulder and tiredly shakes it. “Hattori, wake up. We’ve got a case. Call the police.”

Magically, Hattori is sober enough to raise his head and confusedly blink towards Shinichi’s general direction. “Uh?” After a couple of seconds — twenty, in fact, but he’s drunk so let’s give him a break — his eyes seem to shine with something that Shinichi hopes is a acknowledgement and, with all the grace a wasted twenty-two years old man who isn’t Kaitou KID can manage, he pulls out his phone from his back pocket. (Well, he drops the phone and Shinichi has to bend down and pick it up. But, yeah, Hattori has his phone.)

Clumsy fingers slide on the screen in — Shinichi wants to think — search of his contacts, and he really can’t believe Hattori can’t find a single police officer in less than five seconds because his social circle is literally his family — one of them, the head of the Osaka police department — Kazuha, Ran, his father’s friends — all policemen — and Shinichi and his friends — whom, oh, surprise, also policemen.

“Police… Police…” Hattori stops and frowns, his narrowed eyes turning to Shinichi, and points at the screen. “Kudou, is 229 the police number? I’m pretty sure that’s the pizzeria’s at the corner of the street in — where do I live, again?”

Shinichi’s very (un)pleased to locate himself somewhere between ‘ _five seconds away from committing suicide_ ’ and ‘ _five seconds away from committing murder_ ’. He suspects the barman wouldn’t be happy if he asked for a leaf of lettuce and then used it to either cut his veins or Hattori’s neck, so he opts for snatching the phone from the Osakan’s hands. “I’ll dial the number. You go make sure no one touches anything.”

Hattori looks startled at first — or, well, something close to that — but then something seems to click in that wasted mind of his, and after three attempts, he’s finally heading toward the dead body. Shinichi waits until he’s sure no one is going to mistake him for some drunk lunatic and kick his ass so hard he’ll lose his black cherry (apparently, everyone is too busy panicking or starting to decide the situation is worthy of freaking out) before quickly dialing Megure-keibu’s number phone (that’s, sadly enough, ones of the four numbers he knows by heart — with Ran’s, Haibara’s and Hakase’s — due to the amount of times he’s had to dial it).

When he comes back to the crime scene after his call (which literally consisted of a greeting, the direction and a quick, “Understood, Kudou-kun. We’ll be there right away.”), the bar owner is already amid the crowd, shouting something at a drunk Hattori who’s holding his head as if he were the one with a concussion — which, he is not, Shinichi feels the need to remember.

The staff has already calmed down enough to not keep screaming their vocal chords out, and Kuroba is still knelt beside the corpse, eyes fixed on the fingers around his wrist and — if Shinichi isn’t mistaken — approximately ten seconds away from a panic attack.

One of the maids is flailing her arms around as she explains the series of events. “—and the client was yelling at Tsukiko, and then he just stopped and BAM!” The girl suddenly shouts, the back of her hand accidentally landing in Hattori’s face as she gestures wildly. If Shinichi weren’t so busy covering his ears and trying to not go deaf, he’d ask her why her imitation of a guy falling to the ground sounded exactly like a gunshot.

“It can’t be!” the owner exclaims, their face on their hands, expression somewhere between complete astonishment and utter shock, and Shinichi doesn’t know if that automatically dismisses them as a suspect or brightly points them as the murderer.

“It sure was her!” one of the victim’s friends — a tall man with a messy beard and a beret — shouts and points at Kuroba. “She must have put something in his drink!”

Shinichi simply observes the scene, a little concerned when all Kuroba does is apathetically blink.

“What the hell are ya talkin’ about?” Hattori frowns, rubbing his cheek and looking at them through narrowed eyes as if they’d just said the most stupid thing in the world. “It’s in the left pocket.”

“I knew it!” Beret-san exclaims, reaching out with a scarred hand to grab Kuroba’s arm with, honestly, too dubious intentions for Shinichi’s like — but before he could, Shinichi interposes himself between the two of them, both gripping Beret-san’s wrist and stepping on Kuroba’s foot. (Honestly, he’s so done with that passive behavior of his, his sight is starting to become blurry and his head has been throbbing for the last three minutes. So, yeah, he’s not dealing with a concussion, a drunk Hattori and a dead body _with_ a lifeless Kuroba on top of all.)

“Not her left pocket,” he says, barely conscious of the pair of eyes suddenly blinking up at him and pointedly ignoring the strange retaste that the feminine possessive leaves on his mouth, “but _yours_.”

While Hattori effusively nods— _of course he knew_ —and the rest gasps with puzzling surprise—the maid dresses doesn’t even have pockets, what are they so surprised for?—Kuroba visibly jumps before coming back to his uninterested state, untwisting the fingers around his wrist and bringing himself back to his feet. There’s a reddish circle where the digits were gripping, and the immature, sexually hormoned teenybopper deeply buried in Shinichi’s dark soul eagerly encourages him into wondering if the other wrist still conserves any mark from _that night_.

He opens his mouth to say something but stops short when Kuroba, who’s slightly leaning his weight on him, nudges his hand and whispers, “Right. Sorry, Meitantei.”

The brief warm breath hitting the back of his ear sends a spark down his spine and his eyes catch a glimpse of the most grateful, cute smile Shinichi has ever seen before Kuroba slightly turns away, perfectly balanced despite the thin ten centimeters supporting his body, skirt frills dancing around his thighs. Shinichi’s blood travel straight to his cheeks, and he’s somehow glad something within him works straight, because he definitely does not.

He needs a look from Hattori to realize that, a) there’s a corpse they need to take care of, b) he has a concussion and definitely doesn’t need another thing numbing his senses — much less when that thing breathes and walks and lives and isn’t disappearing any time soon, and c) he’s flustered. His face is red and all Kuroba has done is _whispering_ on his ear and _you’re a serious detective, Shinichi. Snap out of it!_

After mentally slapping himself, he does his best to put on the façade he keeps for interrogating and faces the crowd. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to ask you some questions.”

* * *

 Kaito likes to think he has mostly good ideas.

He didn’t think this was a bad idea even when he saw the local name (‘The Nyaughty Fish’ doesn’t exactly transmit good vibes — and he’s not even going to get started with the _fish_ part). He didn’t think this was a bad idea even when he entered the local and the first thing he was welcomed with was a, uh, human being (he isn’t still quite sure what they were, to be honest) three times his height over his body and a beautiful bump because he just happened to hit his head against a table on the fall.

He didn’t think it was a bad idea even when he was dragged toward a backroom and unceremoniously shoved into a chair in front of a wardrobe. He didn’t think it was a bad idea — in fact, he kind of began to like it — even when his eyes took into the dress and stilettos and he barely contained his inner fangirl from screaming like the crazy bitch it is (although he didn’t understand what maids had to do with those filthy creatures from Hell and why the owner kept adding, “ _Nya-nya~_ ” to everything they said).

Somewhere along the night, he grew used to the feeling of sparks up his legs and his anatomy being squashed between tables and sweaty bodies. He didn’t think it was a bad idea even when he practically spent most of the time trying to not be raped in some dark spot (and thanks God he’s pretty good at that, because it’d have been a very uncomfortable conversation trying to explain that, “Yeah, uh, you see, I may have a good pair of boobs, but in fact I’m more like a waiter, you know? As in, male gender. Dicks rule.”).

He does start to think it may have not been such a good idea when some drunk man grabs his wrists and out of nowhere begins to scream, “Where the fuck is my wallet?”, and if Kaito has to be sincere here, he doesn’t know whether to laugh or to cry, because _you’ve been stealing big jewels for years and this guy is closer to putting you behind bars than Inspector Nakamori, and all because of a wallet. A wallet you do not have. And he isn’t even good-looking!_

The only reason he doesn’t knock this man out and sprints off is because he promised Jii-chan he wouldn’t cause any trouble, and apparently society considers drugging people as causing troubles, so he has no other option than to wait there until the club owner approaches them while reconsidering about his choices (this or his life decisions, he isn’t quite sure).

What he didn’t expect was for the man to start choking and stumbling, a furious shade of red raising to his face, and then the sudden weight of a forty-years-old dragging him to the ground.

Seriously, Kaito likes to consider his ideas are somewhat between the best and ‘I don’t need to see the future, I know this is the best decision ever’. Nevertheless, as cold fingers go still around his wrist and his vision starts to blurry, he has to admit this hasn’t remotely been a good idea whatsoever.

He has only seen a dead body in his twenty one years of life: his father’s. He still remembers it. It was calm and white, a little hint of make-up adorning his cheeks to give them some color, two little spots like pinches of pink. He remembers the smell tickling at his nose at the funeral when he was a child — bleach and Gladioli and a branch variety of Carnations, and a bouquet of Chrysanthemums between his tiny arms. And although all he can smell now is alcohol and sweat and a ridiculous amount of cheap colognes all together, he feels like he’s in that room again, in front of a coffin about to be closed and buried metres and metres underground. Taking all — all he knew, all he wanted, all he loved — with it. Shattering his world into little pieces.

And all he can do is stare.

He stares during an absurd amount of time. He’s barely conscious of the crowd growing around them, the voices increasing and the hysteria possessing the scene. People scream and someone speaks, but all he can do is fixedly stare at the fingers around his wrist, somewhat hoping for them to untwist themselves alone.

“She must have put something on his drink!” he makes out between the hustle and bustle.

He blinks, reconsidering. Has he? Why would he? He doesn’t kill people. He may put pranks on them, maybe drive them a little mad — and, okay, there was this time Hakuba almost fell off the stairs, but he didn’t do it on purpose!

Voices argue, but Kaito can’t distinguish the words, eyes morbidly fixed on the dead body — at least, until a foot harshly steps on his toes and he jerks out of his state to see worn-out sneakers and tight jeans gently embracing a pair of calves. Blinking, his eyes follow the legs up, taking in the beige vest over pale red shirt and the hand grabbing this weird guy with a beret’s wrist and — _oh my God_ — he needs a second to deeply breathe in because _holy fuck, Kudou Shinichi’s perfect self with all his perfection is standing in front of you and you’re acting like the weirdest specimen ever. Eek._

Biting down the, at this rate, expected shriek that wants to leave his lips, he obligues his facial muscles to remain still while he untwists the fingers around his wrist and straightens. He can’t help but stare at the red marks left by the tight grip.

When he lifts his gaze, he realizes he’s not the only one staring at his wrist; Kudou is too.

The detective’s lips open with the clear intention of saying something, but Kaito leans in and discreetly brings his other hand to brush over Kudou’s knuckles and breathes out a, “Right. Sorry, Meitantei.”

Kudou stares at him for a split-second, deadpan as Kaito shoots him a quick, he-hopes-somehow-truthful smile and turns around. He gets to catch the wave of pink color that floods Kudou’s cheeks for approximately twenty seconds before he snaps out of it and releases Beret-san’s wrist.

He turns to face the crowd, his face perfectly still and his next words full of security — and then Kaito knows the show begins.

Fifteen minutes, the police arrival and three interrogations later, Kaito has to admit that, a) watching Kudou Shinichi acting all smart and hearing him talk facts kind of turns him on (and, again, _oh my God_ — Kaito didn’t even know it was humanly possible to be so hot while explaining how poison eats organs up), and b) while admiring Kudou easily getting on in his element is definitely doing evil things to his guts, he can’t help but notice the guy is abnormally red.

Kaito has been paying attention to his movements, hovering around him like some kind of annoying fly using the fact that he’d been the last one in contact with the victim as excuse. Kudou hasn’t said anything despite obviously knowing that Kaito has no idea of what happened and the noticeable discomfort of having him literally breathing on his neck, which only makes Kaito worry more, because we’re talking about the same guy who unhesitantly shoots soccer balls at his face whenever he’s a smartypants and Kaito had been expecting at least three tranquilizer darts by now.

At the seventh time Kudou has to stop and grab his head under the excuse that ‘he feels dizzy’, Kaito stands in front of him, hands in his hips, chest — fake breasts and all — out to make an impression and bent over so he can look at him in the eye with a gaze he hopes minimally resembles the one his mother gave him whenever he got expelled — nearly expelled, in fact — for breaking in the girls changing room. “What’s wrong with you, Meitantei?”

Kudou grimaces, his nose wrinkling in a way Kaito should definitely not find cute. “Nothing. This place is just making me claustrophobic.”

As someone who seems not to know the basis of claustrophobia and the common knowledge of personal space, Kaito gets closer and presses the back of his palm against Kudou’s forehead, vaguely conscious of the fact that claustrophobic people do not have fevers and he must look like an idiot checking Kudou’s temperature with a scientific face for absolutely no scientific motif.

“Does your head hurt? Are you hurt somewhere?” Kudou gives him a deadpan stare, his gaze diverging from Kaito’s face to his hand and back with half-closed eyelids. Kaito pointedly ignores the murdering aura as if it weren't threatening his life whatsoever. “Is it because of that time I knocked you out? Did I miscalculate the angle of the fall and got you hitting your head against the table? Oh my God, did I make you become an idiot and now you can’t think without feeling dizzy because I killed your brain cells? I did, didn’t I? Oh my God, I did it. I broke you. Holy fuck, I broke the Heisei Holmes—”

“Kuroba,” Kudou interrupts him, all narrowed eyes and eyebrows furrowed, and Kaito is quite outraged Kudou is so quiet when he’s freaking out for his well-being. “First, that was literally weeks ago. Second, did you just admit you _calculated_ the angle of the fall?”

Kaito stares, unamused, because that’s so not the point. Kudou looks pale and he’s kind of concerned, and the guy isn’t making his life any easier. “What’s wrong with you?”

“What’s wrong with _you_?” he retorts, wrinkling his nose and slapping away Kaito’s hand. “I told you, it’s—” But Kaito is already leaning in again, closer to his face until he’s inches away to give his ‘ _spit it out already_ ’ stare and most likely stealing the oxygen he definitely needs more. Kudou’s face inexplicably flushes, the red color brighter in comparison to his pale pink shirt. “It… may only be a mild concussion?”

“Ah, a mild concussion,” Kaito easily resolves, straightening back with a relieved expression.

That is until the sentence actually sinks in, cold and full of meaning, and Kaito freezes for five seconds until he can finally wrap his mind around the concept of ‘concussion’ and—

Oh.

Wait.

He… said concussion, didn’t he?

_Yes, Kaito. He said concussion — he_ has _a concussion and all you’re doing is stupidly stare at him with a stupid expression on your stupid face, probably drooling because that’s how your stupid, screwed brain works._

His body bends down over Kudou’s again, eyes piercingly staring into suddenly scared, azure ones, renewed concern boiling up in Kaito’s guts in a beautiful, twisting way that makes him want to vomit. (Maybe Kudou wouldn’t appreciate his gastric juices and bile all over his crotch?)

“Kudou,” Kaito slowly pronounces, all serious and cool as if he knew what he’s doing when he’s positively starting to panic right now and approximately five seconds away from shoving the guy over his shoulder and literally carrying him to the hospital. He puts that down as a possible option before grabbing Kudou’s shoulders and stating, “You have a concussion. You need to go to the hospital.”

Kudou gives him an unimpressed look, all narrowed eyes and eyebrows lazily raising, and Kaito is inclined to think that this is definitely not the first time he has a concussion and that he perfectly knows what he has to do, because that’s what happens when you deal with crime on a daily basis.

“I’m fine,” he grouses, none-so-gently shaking Kaito’s hands off his shoulders. Then he blinks heavily, his nose wrinkling and his hand on his forehead again, and Kaito isn’t buying any of that. “Should be fine.”

“Kudou—”

“They won’t tell me anything I don’t already know,” he cuts off, and Kaito stumbles back into his high heels when he straightens. “No point.”

“Dude,” Kaito stares at him, eyebrows furrowed in concern and hands hovering over him — not touching, but ready to catch if he fell. “You look like shit.” Which, Kaito bitterly notices as his eyes take into Kudou’s heavy lids, worried frown and flushed cheeks, is kind of a lie. He looks, if anything, mildly less handsome than usual with all that paleness and unamused stare fixed on him. “You should really—”

“Shut up,” Kudou sighs, groaning and massaging his temples when the tone seems to be too loud for him.

Kaito clicks his tongue. Hand circling his biceps and unsuccessfully trying to ignore the muscle underneath, he abruptly drags him through the crowd of people towards the back of the club. It’s not an easy task while furiously walking in mortal-high stilettos.

“Hey, hey, hey,” Kudou protests, apologizing to a couple of people they happen to bump in their way. Not that Kaito cares. “I need to keep an eye on Hattori—”

“Fuck Hattori,” he bitterly retorts over his shoulder, pointedly ignoring Kudou’s resistance when Inspector Megure inquires where they are going and he somehow manages to signal the push-and-pull Kaito keeps on him, matter-of-factly.

Kaito pushes open the restrooms’ door with one hand and unceremoniously shoves Kudou into the direction of the counter with the other. “Sit there,” he says, aiming for a harsh tone. It comes out as soft and bleeding with concern, and he mentally slaps himself for that because _you’re supposed to play the bad guy role here, Kaito, and you suck at it_. “Don’t move. Don’t get up, don’t come back to the murder scene — you know what? Don’t even blink.”

The guy hesitantly looks at him for a couple of seconds, probably deliberating if Kaito’s balance in stilettos is good enough to actually stop him if he tried to sprint off and escape. Kaito explicitly slams the door shut and takes a tempting step in his direction, and Kudou seems to decide he’s not in a good position to test anything as he grabs his head again, loudly groaning, and reluctantly backs up and jumps up the counter.

When he lifts his gaze again, he seems more tired and out of it, his eyes barely taking into Kaito’s figure as he comes closer and slowly helps him to lean against the wall, taking care he doesn’t hit his head again or anything.

“You remind me of Ran,” Kudou absentmindedly observes, and Kaito doesn’t know if he should feel flattered — because, honestly, not all days you’re compared to such a beauty, are you? — or sad — because apparently everyone in his life to whom he may feel the slightest attraction seems to be fond of that girl. Then, Kudou frowns and closes his eyes as he mutters, “I wish she were here,” and Kaito decides Kudou’s comparison isn’t something to be happy about.

He finds himself wishing she were here instead of him too.

Kaito lets go of him and pensively clicks his tongue, averting his gaze as he straightens. “Unfortunately for both of us,” he says, one hand on the counter beside Kudou’s thigh supporting him as he takes off his heels with the other, “Mouri-chan is at Aoko’s right now pretending to watch Enchanted but actually just making out, so you’re stuck with me. I’m not happy about it either.”

Kudou hums, his eyes staring for a long moment at the red, crossing lines covering Kaito’s feet right under his toes before lifting his head back to lock gazes with him. The sparkling azure is darkened by a fog of dizziness, making them twinkling and unfocused and a deeper shade of dark blue that has Kaito almost sheepishly gasping.

He has to bite the inside of his cheek to remind himself that the guy needs help, thank you very much, and that _they are eyes, Kaito. Everyone has eyes. You have eyes, he has eyes — even flies have eyes. They’re_ nothing _to gasp for_. “Don’t move,” he orders in the end, turning on his heels toward the sink and opening the faucet. He’s tempted for the tenth of a minute to put his face under the water either until he chokes to death or until it stops feeling so hot.

He decides against it — mostly because that would be humiliating and it’s not like his dignity can afford it — and settles for something less pathetic as running a hand through his face. He reaches up for the ending of his ribbon and pulls it until the lace comes undone before wetting the piece of fabric under the stream of the tap. Meanwhile, he opens the cabinet over the mirror and stands on his tip-toes, feeling around and grabbing a bottle he hopes contains painkillers.

“You weren’t wearing extensions,” Kudou mentions, and Kaito is a little ashamed to admit it makes him jump in his place and nearly lose balance. Embarrassment is soon forgotten, though, when the low tone Kudou uses actually sinks in and Kaito realizes he’s fighting sleepiness, and he vaguely remembers a documentary from Discovery Max saying something about people with concussions not supposed to fall asleep. “The pigtails. They weren’t extensions.”

“Of course they weren’t,” Kaito retorts, almost shrieking and hoping that goes unnoticed as an outraged tone when he’s actually setting off alarms in his head and preparing himself for yet another panic attack. “I didn’t know I had to dress up as a maid when I first got here.”

He rapidly checks the bottle of pills out, barely registering the letters spelling ‘aspirins’ with a clumsy handwriting before opening it and taking one. Then, he remembers the amount of pills within Kudou’s lifetime and decides that the guy may be pretty much immune to the doses of drug that would kill an elephant or two, so he opts for two instead of one.

He shoves the pills into Kudou’s hand with a really quick, “Here, swallow” and appreciatively observes as the guy does as said without complaining (not that Kaito would have accepted something else. He’s sure Kudou would be able to swallow a pill even in his sleep by now, so he’d definitely have shoved the aspirins down his throat if he asked for something as insignificant as water) before closing the faucet and gathering up the soaking wet lace.

Kaito uses the couple of seconds it takes for Kudou to take the pills to squeeze the material before turning on his heels again and rapidly making his way back between Kudou’s legs. He’s completely conscious of Kudou’s burning gaze on his face as he leans in into his personal space and his warm breath hitting the bottom of his chin as Kudou breathes out, and he would lie if he said his stomach doesn’t instantly start practicing flip-backs at the mint toothpaste and the pine needles cologne Kudou uses tickling at his nose. Kaito pointedly ignores all of that in favor of wrapping the wet ribbon around Kudou’s head, appreciating again the thought that the guy would most likely prefer not having Kaito’s digested dinner on his crotch.

“Did you really mean it?” Kudou asks out of nowhere right beside Kaito’s ear, and Kaito is so focused on his current task, on his tiptoes so he gets a clearer view of the back of Kudou’s head, that he almost falls back when he suddenly straightens, his body shivering. The only thing that prevents him from doing so is Kudou’s reflexes and his hands on his hips, strong and big and warm through the thin cloth of the dress, keeping him in place and worsening his balance at the same time.

His whole self goes instantly still and Kaito audibly squeaks, slightly squirming underneath Kudou’s hands because he’s slowly but steadily going back into his freaking-out mode again and his body is dangerously conscious of all the sparks Kudou’s touch is driving throughout the whole extension from top to toe and it would be really embarrassing if he got a boner just because the guy grabbed his hips.

Kudou either doesn’t realize Kaito’s practically shivering like a newborn deer between his hands or doesn’t care, because he slightly tightens his grip and pulls Kaito closer until his knees hit the counter. Kaito will forever deny the creaking squeal that leaves his lips as Kudou innocently pushes his back, wordlessly insting him to keep going with the bandage, and he thanks whatever is up there the guy is too out of it to actually realize his reactions.

Kaito uses all the power of his poker face to raise his hands without them trembling while muttering a brief, “Hmm?” to Kudou’s question, but it comes out so high-pitched it hurts even his own ears. His only success — in his whole life, probably — is reaching the ending of the lace, and he’s quite proud of himself for actually going on steadily with the wrapping.

“Did you mean it?” Kudou repeats, his breath hitting Kaito’s chin this time because _there’s no way in Hell those lips are coming anywhere my ear again. Nope._ Not that the alternative is much better, he realizes when Kudou’s breath drops to his clavicle with a loud sigh and a slight grimace when Kaito pulls the lace too hard. “When you said you weren’t happy being stuck with me. Did you really mean it?”

Kaito frowns, his hands hesitating for a quarter of second in which his brain processes the question, and he’s about to ask what the hell he’s talking about when he remembers the short ‘I wish you were Ran’ conversation and _oh_. So this is what it’s about.

He promptly comes back to work, muttering a considering, “I… guess.” Kudou rapidly raises his head again, hitting Kaito’s chin in the process, cloudy eyes taking their time to focus on Kaito’s face. Kaito whines and very unkindly smacks his nape, more concerned about the sting on his jaw than the fact that he should probably not be hitting a person with a concussion, much less in the head. “Why do you ask, anyway?” he inquires, his hands going back to work and positively noticing he’s almost done. _Thanks, God._ “You were the one who said it.”

Kudou avidly retorts a, “I didn’t!”, but Kaito firmly ignores him in favor of sticking the ending of the lace between the bandage. He has to refrain himself from very unmanly shrieking out of enthusiasm.

He doesn’t even get to lower his arms when Kudou pulling at his hips brings him back to Earth again, and the realization that he’s still between his hands and very near of his body and _oh my God, he’s staring at me. He’s staring at me and I’m quite staring at him too. Well, I’m pretty much staring at him. As in, completely staring down at him and — oh my God, this is too close_ slaps him with enough force to make him lose balance. Or maybe it’s just his legs going wobbling.

“I said I wished you were Ran, not that I wasn’t happy of being stuck with you,” Kudou whispers, so close to his mouth Kaito can pretty much taste the mint toothpaste now, and he fucking wonders why he has to whisper when it’s just the two of them in here.

Kaito rolls his eyes, the twenty percent of his brain that isn’t a freaked-out, gay mess reminding him that Kudou has a concussion and whatever he says is as reasonable as Juanita’s speech. (Juanita is his dove — a very, very, _very_ talkative dove.) “Yeah, sure, whatever you say. Would you mind letting go of—? _Heyheyhey_ , what’s wrong?” Kudou’s head suddenly drops to his shoulder, heavy and tickling where the cow licks rub against Kaito’s flesh, and Kaito has to use all his self-restraint to not squeak and actually bring himself to being concerned.

Somehow Kaito manages to sneak his hands between them both and take him by the shoulders and slightly shakes him, but all Kudou does is vaguely mumbling something unintelligible against the frounces of his sleeve and move his arms until he’s hugging Kaito by the waist and nuzzling at the junction of his neck in search of the warmest spot, as if he were his new pillow. Between all the nonsense coming from Kudou’s mouth, Kaito can make out a, “Sleepy. Good night.”

A couple of seconds of realization passes by until the meaning of those three words sinks in and the chaos sets off in his brain, pieces of paper flying, the staff screaming and the desks on fire, and a tiny Patrick stuffed in a tight cheerer uniform with brightly colorful feathers is screaming, “Calm down, Spongebob! It’s only _fire_!”. Such a beautiful metaphor of his life.

“Hey.” He shakes Kudou again, but the guy only scoffs again and hugs him harder, happily sighing upon finding his clavicle and sending a breeze of so unnecessary warm air, and Kaito vey unkildly tells the déjà vú tickling at his memory to fuck off. Is this punishment or something? “Hey, dude, come on. “Don’t you dare fall asleep on me.”

Kudou hums and mutters something alike, “Five more minutes”, and Kaito finds himself inclined to comment that if they wait any longer than thirty seconds he’ll be the one needing to visit a hospital due to an anxiety attack. He bites the top of his tongue, though, and decides to leave his hysteria take control of his inner, chibi self while he pushes Kudou by his shoulders and straightens him.

The guy wasn’t kidding when he said he wanted to sleep. His eyes are already closed and his mouth is half-open, and Kaito tries really hard to focus on the trickle of saliva running down his chin rather than the way thick, dark eyelashes fall over his cheeks, gently caressing and — he’s failing here. Kudou drooling should definitely not be a sexually appealing sight, especially when the guy could perfectly be dying. Kaito finds himself wanting to cry nonetheless, because it’s just not fair they look so alike and still Kudou drooling is inexplicably sexy and hot and then there’s him, twenty-one years old, waking up with unappealing white traces down his chin and Aoko throwing a towel to his face and yelling at him to open the front door decently.

He’s positively swallowing and choking on his own sobbings by the time Kudou softly snores, his mouth gaping and making wet, irritating sounds that should definitely not make Kaito flustered. _Okay_ , he tells himself, moving his hands up to the guy’s cheeks and cupping them. Kudou’s body slightly falls forward with the weight of gravity, and somehow his face ends up squashed between Kaito’s hands, his lips pursing in a f-f— _oh my God_ , Kaito feels like puking—fishy, comical kissing face. _Okay, Kaito, you can do this. Just — just keep him awake. It can’t be that hard._

_This would be easier if you hadn’t fallen asleep during that documentary, you idiot_ , a small, high-pitched voice — that sounds suspiciously pretty much like Aoko’s — reminds him, and he tells himself it’s not the time to whine about his poor stamina when it comes to deal with documentaries because _you need to keep the guy awake, Kaito. Alive. Eyes open, speaking, breathing. You’re a somewhat smart guy. Just talk to him. Use your tongue._

Kaito blinks, startled for a second in which Kudou almost slips between his hands. _Use my tongue?_

Out of a poof of sparkly, pale pink smoke over Kudou’s shoulder, a five-inches-tall Aoko with an abnormally big head and a pair of red horns appears, wearing for some reason her high-school uniform and gripping a mop taller than her. She points at him and then at Kudou with the mop, her lips pursing back and showing her exaggeratedly pointy canines in a way Kaito would usually describe as utterly adorable if he didn’t have the feeling that this chibi-Aoko is about to throw herself at his throat. _Use your tongue!_

And use his tongue he does.

If someone were to ask, he’d probably blame it on the three mental breaks he’s had in the last two hours and the fact that he doesn’t function well under pressure. He should probably put it down in some mental note before his consciousness says bye-bye and slips away, because that ‘someone’ will most likely be Kudou in the next two minutes and he’s so going to ask. And, to be completely honest, Kaito is glad Kudou’s mouth is currently too busy with his to actually be able to articulate a word.

Kissing Kudou again is… something. (Something Kaito wasn’t ready for and should definitely not be enjoying because he’s sure forcefully kissing people with concussions isn’t either legal or morally correct and this can be considered sexual harassment and he’s so not ready for that level of stress in his life again.) Kudou’s lips are closed and pressed in a thin line, unmoving under Kaito’s own mouth, and his eyes wide open and staring down at Kaito as if he had grown up a second, reptile head, that head was the one kissing him and he had the tongue awfully spinning inside his mouth. It’s strange and unexpected and somewhat uncomfortable, the angle bad enough that their noses end up bumping, and Kaito is pretty sure he felt at least three teeth sinking into his inner, upper lip flesh.

From the corner of his eye, he can see the chibi-Aoko making weird faces and furiously gesturing things that would be censored in anime and most likely mean his promptly and inevitable death if he doesn’t back up in the next… Well, Kaito supposes that chubby hand randomly fisting at the air means some time around ‘right now’ and ‘in the next two milliseconds’.

There’s a strange, wet, loud sound hen Kaito pulls apart, his lips pursed in a ducking, kissy face and Kudou’s still drawing that thin line. His eyes keep staring down at him, open and wide and without blinking, and his hands hasn’t moved so far, and Kaito is kind of starting to get concerned that he has triggered some type of post-traumatic stress disorder — the forceful kiss being the traumatic event in question — and Kudou has just gone catatonic on him.

He clicks his fingers in front of his face, swearing in a low voice when all he gets in return is the absolute response of an entire, complete _nothing_ , and is positively going through his third excuse in case he has to tell what happened to the police, or a judge, or maybe his legal aid lawyer — or worse: Aoko — when Kudou mutters a, “Why did you do that?”

Kaito goes through the whole process of a short-circuit before his brain registers the meaning of that sentence, and it’s kind of embarrassing admitting he needed two minutes of blankly staring at Kudou’s still rather pale, rather handsome face to put five simple words together.

It’s no surprise for him when his tongue just decides to go on its own and truthfully states, “A mini-Aoko with a big head and a mop told me to use my tongue.”

Kudou’s expressionless face mutates to a deep frown, seemingly hesitant before he asks a doubtful, “... Okay?” with the ‘you’ unsaid, and seriously, Kaito can’t even bring himself to blame it on the guy when he himself admits that sounded kind of crazy. And was a turn-off.

He knows he should probably say something minimally intelligent now, because currently Kudou’s concussed brain is most likely showing more reasoning skills than his and he’s supposed to be the healthy, responsible adult here.

That sounded like a good theory. Seriously, it did. Maybe that’s why Kaito very kindly wants to slap himself pretty strongly when he convincingly nods, his lips parting a couple of times and his brain juggling with words to finally formule a smart, thought-provoking, revolutionary, “Super.”

_That’s it, Kaito. That’s how you use your Japanese grammar skills. Vocabulary. Expression. Good adjectivation, even better verbalization. The power of communication._

He’s positively going through a self-disdain crisis and maybe starting to consider the possibility of changing his best friend since some of Aoko’s grammar usage knowledge should have sunk on him by now and it obviously hasn’t, when Kudou’s frown increases, his eyes narrowing with a seemingly pretty deep realization. “You didn’t use your tongue,” he states, matter-of-factly.

“I didn’t,” Kaito almost automatically responds, and in his defense he must add that he’s taken aback, his brain isn’t working correctly and Kudou’s hands have just squeezed his hips.

Kudou hums, his thumbs absentmindedly drawing circles around Kaito’s hipbones (Kaito would pretty much like to know how the hell he’s found them between the mess of flounces and wrinkled apron that is his skirt) while some kind of odd battle seems to flash momentarily through his eyes. He rapidly looks up and down, biting down on his lip with hesitation, and if Kaito weren’t so focused on the fact that Kudou has shamelessly just checked his lips out, he’d probably have been surprised that Kudou isn’t sure about something.

His thumbs stop their circular movements, hands squeezing Kaito’s hips again before they slide over the maid dress until his lower back. “I…” Kudou begins, almost immediately stopping to briefly let his tongue wet his lips. Kaito just hopes his gulp wasn’t as audible as he felt it. “I think we should fix that.”

At this point, Kaito is pretty sure he should listen to that instinct within him that’s screaming and making flipping movements with a fluorescent lighted sign for him to ungently untangle Kudou’s arms from his waits, wave his goodbye and take off to Hell. Because this whole situation spells D A N G E R in seven different languages and the chibi-Aoko is still there, over Kudou’s shoulder, gripping her mop with a rather murderous face and an eye twitching, and Kaito bets that isn’t healthy at all.

He brings his hands down and grabs Kudou’s arms with all the intention of telling the guy, “Yeah, no. I think you should go back to your dead body and I should go fuck myself rather than very willingly letting _you_ fuck me again”, but then Kudou is leaning in, his face too close for Kaito’s comfort, all his minty breath mercilessly hitting Kaito’s nose and making his already screwed mind dizzy, and somehow it isn’t even surprising when he finds himself whispering, “Me too.”

Disappointing, yes; surprising... Not really.

Their foreheads bump together. Kaito has to tighten his grip on Kudou’s shirt sleeves, because his breath is coming out too steady for Kaito’s like and his fingers itch for tangling themselves with the perfectly gelled locks of his nape. “Cool.”

Kaito is sure he must look like an idiot when he nods, his mouth half-open and gasping out a, “Yeah, cool”, but then Kudou’s half-closed eyes go up and down his face again before he lets himself fall in, his lips crashing with Kaito’s in a quite forceful way, and Kaito’s positive he doesn’t give a damn single fuck about anything that doesn’t involve the mouth taking his breath away.

Kudou is an adamant kisser. Kaito remembers that. He likes to feel in more control than Kaito is comfortable with, lead the things his way and his pace, going from fast to slow and then again wildly rapid that it’s almost impossible to follow. A challenge. And Kaito is forcefully reminded of what it really is to accept that challenge, what it actually feels like kissing Kudou Shinichi again — not shallow, not skin-deeply, but breathtakingly, intensely — when the hands in his bottom back push him closer and teeth insistently nip at his bottom lip, abusing the flesh until he has Kaito opening his mouth and hopelessly panting in poor intents of filling his lungs with something that isn’t Kudou’s essence.

It doesn’t work. The pine needles cologne is still there, intoxicating and mercilessly flooding his system, and the tongue sneaking into his mouth brings the new taste of minty toothpaste and the rather citrus aftertaste of bright orange shoots. Kaito has very little time after registering the fact that people with concussions should definitely not consume alcoholic drinks and that _oh, I’m engaging in a hot, passionate make out session with a hot,_ drunk _Kudou yet again_ before he very pointedly obligues his brain to shut the fuck up, because it’s kind of depressing realizing it could perfectly be Mouri-chan since, a) Kudou would most likely be completely okay with kissing even a crocodile right now, and b) he did literally say he prefers Kaito to be her.

Kaito decides to focus on fighting Kudou’s dominance instead. On entangling his fingers in Kudou’s hair (he isn’t sure when they get there, but there they are) between the bandage, on pushing Kudou down by his nape and raising himself on his toes so their heights are around the same.

Kudou growls when Kaito’s tongue ungently invades his mouth, hyperactive and excited and curious. Kaito has positively found at least three of Kudou’s weak spots, has him harshly moaning in a low voice and is on the verge of grinning when, in the blink of an eye, Kudou’s hands are gone from his lower back, suddenly reappearing and aiming at the hem of Kaito’s dress. They —admittedly — masterfully sneak in under the skirt, his fingers feeling up the skin of Kaito’s upper thighs before grabbing them, stroking and squeezing and bruising and turning Kaito’s legs into wobbling messes.

(He’s doing great not moaning yet, though, and he’s quite proud of himself for that, because he’s so going to need the coldest shower ever after this.)

The detective shifts his hands again, almost setting off the Kaito Squeaking Mechanism when his fingers curl around Kaito’s inner thighs, tightly clutching the flesh and eagerly pulling him up. It’s definitely strange and difficult, and Kaito has to maneuver a lot to both keep kissing Kudou and crawl onto the counter without one of them opening their heads — but somehow he makes it work, one of his hands on the wall behind them and the other holding onto Kudou’s nape, bringing him up, while one of his legs settles beside Kudou’s thigh and the other ends up on Kudou’s crotch. Pressing. Apparently in a quite pleasant way, if the way Kudou moans in his mouth and pushes him closer is anything to go by — and, _oh_ , he decides he likes that sound. Pretty much.

In some part of his brain, Kaito vaguely knows he should be minimally concerned about the fact that he’s making out in a public restroom with his crush’s girlfriend’s _detective_ best friend, shamelessly rubbing his knee against his unmistakable boner just for the pleasure of hearing him groaning again and with said detective’s hands on his butt cheeks, stroking and grabbing and bruising them from under his cotton panties as if he was the owner, and he’s absolutely loving it. It’s alarming, Kaito decidedly resolves between gasps once Kudou’s mouth leaves his to nip at his jaw and go souther, his fingers digging into Kaito’s butt flesh and bringing him up until his lips are touching his exposed collarbone.

It’s between a choked whine and two particularly forceful bites at the junction of his neck that realization sinks in. His nails are digging at Kudou’s nape, his leg very willingly following Kudou’s touch when his hand travels down his thigh and his fingers curl at the back of his knee with the silent command of spreading them further until Kaito is hovering over his lap, their chests flushed and Kudou’s hand still abusing his ass. It’s exciting and arousing and so _wrong_ , and he seriously needs either a good therapist or to install Google Maps, because he's got lost somewhere down the line in his good-for-nothing life and someone should badly help him spot his pitiful self out the ocean of wonderful pity that is freely engaging into intimate activities with Kudou Shinichi again.

That someone did not have to be Hattori Heiji — but he is, anyway.

The guy simply storms into the restroom, opening the door as much as it’s humanly possible for everyone else to see and very indiscreetly screaming at absolutely no one, “Oh, Kudou, there you are, I’ve been lookin’ for—OHMYFUCKINGGOD, KUDOU, LET GO OF _THAT_!”, and Kaito doesn’t really know whether to be outraged about being called _that_ or ashamed that Hattori’s eyes are fixedly staring at his completely exposed legs, his skirt long since barely covering his stomach.

All in all, he’s proud of not squeaking. He’d be even prouder if it weren’t a filthy _lie_.

But he doesn’t really have time to worry about his unmanly sounds before something flies through the air and hits Hattori on the head, positively knocking him out and possibly occasioning the second concussion of the day.

Hattori’s body falls to the ground, and Kaito would have sighed in relief if he hadn’t been too occupied trying to save his life, because suddenly Kudou shoves him off his lap, ungently throwing him to whatever is at his side, which happens to be the counter edge. So, yeah, Kaito has a really hard time gripping whatever is nearer to save his ass from a pretty hurtful fall. It doesn’t help that the thing he grabs is Kudou’s already wrinkled shirt, almost dragging the guy with him.

Kudou turns to him, narrowed eyes going from Kaito’s hand on his shoulder to Kaito’s face and giving him a look, all questioning and too judgmental for someone who has a very noticeable bulge on his crotch, his lips obscenely swollen and bitten red and three different shades of pink inking his cheeks. “You threw a stiletto to his head,” he states, unamused, surely with that tone he uses with his suspects but that doesn’t suit the situation whatsoever.

Kaito pouts and accusingly points at Hattori’s body, because he’s seven years old now and it isn’t his fault Hattori doesn’t know how to knock. “He scared me!”

The detective does that thing with his lids that a normal people would call blinking but that looks like having an epileptic attack on him, and Kaito tries very hard not to get distracted by how the long, dark eyelashes seem to make his eyes bluer. “They were on the floor!”

“Now, you’re underestimating my skills as a magician and that’s simply outrageous.” Kaito clicks his tongue, letting go of Kudou’s shirt, and jumps off the counter. He takes a moment to fix his skirt and mentally thank the flounces and the apron for hiding his erection. “You seem fine now. I’m going.”

“Hey, hey, wait!” Kudou reaches out and grabs his arm just above his elbow, making Kaito stop in his tracks and forcefully turn. He stares, unamused, and Kudou lets go of him when Kaito pointedly pinches his hand with all the sharpness of his nails. “Where are you going?”

“Home,” he resolves, matter-of-factly, and bends down to pick up his discarded high heels, peering from the corner of his eye and almost grinning as Kudou stands up too and grimaces at the problem between his legs when it doesn’t seem to be getting any better anytime soon.

Kudou huffs and runs a hand through his already disheveled hair, courtesy of Kaito. He seems to be hesitating over something, his posture giving out just how uneasy he’s feeling, and Kaito would be lying if he said he isn’t curious about why Kudou is such an intense kisser when he’s so reluctant about anything else. “Fine, fine. I’m sorry, just — could you please refrain from knocking my friends out in the future?”

Kaito takes a precious time straightening, high heels hanging from two of his fingers while he balances them and silently delighting in the beautiful sensation of being in control again. “Sure,” Kaito agrees, shrugging, because he’s positive this situation isn’t happening again. Ever. So, yeah, he’s not going to knock any more friends out. “What do you want me for, detective?”

Kudou’s eyebrow twitches at the nickname, but he shrugs it off in favor of Kaito’s amused, incisive gaze on him. He even made sure to arc the eyebrow that is perfectly shaped with makeup. “Carry him,” Kudou finally says, nodding towards Hattori.

Kaito hums, a smirk parting his lips, and he lets it because he hasn’t been a bastard for a while and kind of needs it. “Why? Are we out of shape?”

_No, he isn’t_ , the annoying voice in his head reminds him, matter-of-factly showing pictures of Kudou’s arms just to make a point or drive Kaito mad, who knows. Kaito very unkindly shuts it down both because he doesn’t need the reminder of just how true that statement is and because he’s perfectly fine without that voice mocking him, thank you very much.

Kudou’s chest goes up and down with a deep, long intake before he mutters something that sounds like, “I’m out of _patience_ ” under his breath, pinching the bridge of his nose. “You can always walk out,” he says in the end, lazily waving at the door. “Looking like that you’ll probably have a minute or two before some random guy jumps into you. It’ll be fun when they find out you’re not precisely hiding what they’re looking for.”

“I’ll take the arms,” Kaito kindly offers, pointedly ignoring the heat that raises to his collarbone and settles on his cheeks and jumping to do exactly that, both because Kudou has a point and he has an erection and he’s not going to admit any of those.

Kudou clicks his tongue, seemingly satisfied with that response as he breathes out a, “Yeah, I supposed that” and moves to take Hattori’s legs.

* * *

 “Oh my God,” Kaito sighs, head bumping against the fluffy headrest of the taxi after they’d unceremoniously shoved Hattori into the backseat, legs over Kaito’s lap. “What the hell does he eat?”

“Takoyaki, usually,” Kudou replies between two gasps, in a beat and too serious to be joking. “But I’m trying to make him move on to Yakiniku.”

Kaito raises his head and gives him a pointed look, meaningfully arching one of his eyebrows. “You know,” he says, watching as Kudou leans over, hands on his knees to catch his breath. “That was a rhetorical question, but now I’m curious. You _know_ his diet?”

The unamused gaze that Kudou shoots him is enough to bite down on his lip to stop the smirk that wants to show up, and Kaito mimics the action of zippering his lips and throwing away the key because he can’t really afford being on Kudou’s blacklist.

“Do you want to share the cab?” he asks, most likely out of politeness or a hidden, murderous intention of throwing Kaito off the car in motion.

“Nah, it’s okay, it’s not far,” Kaito dismisses, trying to shake Hattori’s legs out of his lap and failing. He really needs to cut down on Takoyaki. “I’ll walk.”

Kudou holds out a hand in a silent offer of help, and he only hesitates a split-second before taking it and being yanked out of the car.

Kudou’s hand feels somewhat different from what it felt back on the restroom, less rough and more soft and slightly wet from sweat, and Kaito is vaguely conscious he keeps holding it for maybe too long. He lets go immediately a few beats too late, clumsily untwisting their fingers, and it’s awkward. Kind of. Kaito doesn’t know what to do with his hands, so he rubs them against his skirt and clears his throat.

“Thank you,” Kudou says, scratching the back of his neck and gesturing behind him at absolutely nothing because there’s a wall, but Kaito deduces he’s referring to the restroom and his poor life decisions. “For keeping me awake.”

Kaito makes something weird between waving, bumbling and trying to act cool, as if he weren’t having an internal crisis about his existence in general. “Anytime.”

Kudou is visibly concerned about the fact that he has stumbled over his own feet twice, and kind of takes longer than necessary to walk around Kaito and get in the taxi, without breaking eye contact. He stops before closing the door, though, looking up at Kaito.

“We’re…” he starts, hesitantly, his voice lilting up in slight question, biting down on his lip before even finishing the sentence.

Kaito needs narrowed eyes and a worried expression to realize that Kudou is asking if he’s going to go all hysteric once more and start hiding under tables again just to avoid him, and he doesn’t quitely know how sad it is that even he is surprised that that wasn’t his plan. “We’re cool, dude,” he assures, giving Kudou his thumbs up when he doesn’t seem completely convinced. “Yeah. Super. The best.”

The detective clicks his tongue for the umpteenth time tonight, his hand fidgeting on the handle. “Right,” he says in a tone that doesn’t sound right at all.

“I’m,” Kaito says after a prolonged silence, gesturing vaguely over his shoulder at the opposite side from where his house actually is, “going. Home,” he concludes, spinning around before grimacing and powerfully shutting down the sudden desire of bumping his head against the wall.

“Kuroba,” Kudou calls again, making him stop on his tracks with a well hidden cry, “one more thing.”

Kaito turns on his heels, humming — more like whining — in response and suddenly locking eyes. Kudou hesitates, visibly startled for half a second, and scratches his neck as he diverges his gaze, door already half-closed and teeth abusing his bottom lip and giving Kaito a tachycardia.

“I know it doesn’t matter and that we’re not talking about this again — and it really doesn’t mean anything — but…” He takes a deep intake and raises his head, blue eyes sparkling with determination and fixedly staring at Kaito. It almost makes him flinch. “I wasn’t drunk this time, and I really enjoyed it.”

* * *

The next morning, Hattori wakes up to a pounding thump at the back of his head, a bump in his forehead already turning violet and the sight of Shinichi distractedly sipping at a Christmas themed, three-quarters-of-litre big mug of intense black coffee while reading a newspaper.

“Good morning,” he says from under the door frame, at which Shinichi only nods in acknowledgement without lowering his mug or taking his eyes off the page he’s reading. Hattori scratches his nape, obviously hesitating as his mouth parts to say something else but changing his mind in the end as he only shakes his head and leads to the kitchen.

Shinichi pointedly ignores him and says nothing as Hattori walks around the kitchen counter, eyes narrowed in visibly confusion and concentration even when he grabs the bright green mug adorned with the Big Osaka signature he purposefully left at Shinichi’s house and pours himself the almond milk Shinichi was obliged to buy three days ago when Hattori called him and announced more than asked he was sticking around for a while.

Hattori leans in on the counter, a white moustache over his upper lip and his hands fidgeting around the mug, seemingly deep in his thoughts.

“Kudou?” he calls out, tentatively. Shinichi hums in response. “Were you making-out yesterday with a dude dressed up as a maid on the counter of the restroom of the club we went to after the case when I stormed in, interrupted you and the aforementioned guy knocked me out with a pretty sharp stiletto, causing both the bump and the headache I currently have?” he asks, and it’s all oddly detailed, in Shinichi’s opinion, for someone who doesn’t seem to remember last night.

He raises his mug to his lips again. “No.”

Hattori blinks a couple of times, spinning the mug once again with a frown before shrugging. He seems okay with that answer as he drowns his almond milk, though he keeps taking peeks at Shinichi’s head every now and then throughout breakfast. Shinichi pointedly ignores it.

Later will he realize the reason why Hattori kept looking at him so suspiciously was because of the colorful ribbon he had still wrapped around his head.

**Author's Note:**

> If you're reading this, author is pleased you took your time and sat down to roll down her new creation! She hopes you've had a great time and will come back whenever her brains collaborates and lets her write the next chapter.
>
>> Author is not perfect and she knows it, but she'd like to know your opinion through comments. Feel free to say whatever you want and she'll reply as soon as possible~. Also don't forget to leave a Kudo if you've liked this and author will reward you with airmail sent little Kurobas, huhuhu 7w7r


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